Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
During, you want the crude things: leave the room, get outside, cold water on your wrists, say nothing for two minutes. Keep the fair reading and the perspective for later, when there is a mind available to do it with. Trying to reappraise at full heat mostly hands you one more thing you have failed at.
If Satan should prompt you to do something, seek refuge with God (Quran 7:200). The move is placed right at the prompting, early, before there is anything left to argue with.
الأعراف
وَإِمَّا يَنزَغَنَّكَ مِنَ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنِ نَزۡغࣱ فَٱسۡتَعِذۡ بِٱللَّهِۚ إِنَّهُۥ سَمِيعٌ عَلِيمٌ
If Satan should prompt you to do something, seek refuge with God- He is all hearing, all knowing
Qur’an 7:200read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A seven-day diary study found that the strategy people reached for depended on how intense the emotion was, so what serves in mild irritation is not what people actually use when strongly provoked. That is a good reason to keep different tools for different heights. Diary reports show what people do rather than what would have worked best.
Kozubal M, Szuster A, Wielgopolan A. (2023). Emotional regulation strategies in daily life: the intensity of emotions and regulation choice.. Frontiers in psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
The thinking a rethink needs is the first thing to go as arousal climbs.
Gritting your teeth works right up until you are tired, hungry or already stretched. Watching the anger from a small distance is the steadier option, because it does not need holding up.
Put your small interruption right before the moment you already know is hard. If it is the drive home, do it as you get into the car.
Picture a machine set to strike at anything that even slightly resembles a threat. It would hit the postman, the neighbour's dog and, sooner or later, a child in a muddy coat.