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Areas › Anger › Making it stick
Willpower is at its thinnest exactly when you need it most: late, tired, hungry, already provoked. So do the work earlier, where it is cheap. Decide in advance what you will do, and where you can, arrange things so the hardest choice does not come up at all.
You who believe, be steadfast, more steadfast than others; be ready (Quran 3:200). Readiness is named alongside steadfastness, which is the difference between meaning well and being prepared.
آل عمران
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ ٱصۡبِرُواْ وَصَابِرُواْ وَرَابِطُواْ وَٱتَّقُواْ ٱللَّهَ لَعَلَّكُمۡ تُفۡلِحُونَ
You who believe, be steadfast, more steadfast than others; be ready; always be mindful of God, so that you may prosper
Qur’an 3:200read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A set of experiments on if then plans found they did help people follow through, but the benefit depended on how strong the unwanted habit already was, working best before the habit was entrenched. That is a caution as much as an encouragement, since plans are not magic against a deeply grooved reaction. It also suggests planning early rather than after years of the same pattern.
Webb TL, Sheeran P, Luszczynska A. (2009). Planning to break unwanted habits: habit strength moderates implementation intention effects on behaviour change.. The British journal of social psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Under pressure you fall back on what is already trained, not on what you intended.
Rehearsing a calmer response is not thinking about change, it is the change. Each repetition makes that route slightly quicker to reach for.
Sit still, choose a position, and hold it. Within seconds your body will be asking to move the chin or scratch the neck, and each of those small urges is a free repetition of letting an impulse pass.
Your brain is less a single organ than a crowd of billions of cells working out what to do next. The angry pull you feel is one voice in that crowd, not the whole of you.