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Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
That lag is why anger seems to arrive fully formed. It does not, quite, and the earliest part of it is physical: heat, a jaw setting, a change in your breathing. Learn your own first sign, the one that shows up every time, and you get a little of that time back.
Those who are aware of God think of Him when Satan prompts them to do something and immediately they can see [straight] (Quran 7:201). The clarity is described as returning at once, as soon as the prompting is noticed.
الأعراف
إِنَّ ٱلَّذِينَ ٱتَّقَوۡاْ إِذَا مَسَّهُمۡ طَٰٓئِفࣱ مِّنَ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنِ تَذَكَّرُواْ فَإِذَا هُم مُّبۡصِرُونَ
those who are aware of God think of Him when Satan prompts them to do something and immediately they can see [straight]
Qur’an 7:201read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A multilevel study found that both a general tendency towards mindfulness and moment-to-moment changes in it predicted lower aggressiveness, with dwelling on anger as the path between them. Noticing appears to matter in the moment and not only as a trait. The design was observational, so noticing more and reacting less may travel together for other reasons.
Eisenlohr-Moul TA, Peters JR, Pond RS, DeWall CN. (2016). Both trait and state mindfulness predict lower aggressiveness via anger rumination: A multilevel mediation analysis.. Mindfulness doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Noticing the body's early signal gets you into the sequence sooner than waiting for the feeling to announce itself.
Choosing has two halves: seeing that there is more than one thing you could do, and then actually taking one. Failing at either looks identical from outside and needs quite different work.
When the watch on the wrong wrist keeps bothering you, the honest answer is: good. The bother is what is doing the work, so there is nothing here to fix.
Draw a small circle on three separate scraps of paper without thinking about it. Then look: same size, same spot on the page, same direction of stroke, same starting point, nearly every time.