Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Anger › The moment before you snap
Write the key at the top of the page so you are not holding it in your head. The sorting is useful because putting a rough name to something is often enough to loosen it. If deciding which letter takes more than a second, put a plain dot and move on, because a practice that turns into analysis has quietly become the thing it was meant to interrupt.
Tell My servants to say what is best (Quran 17:53). Choosing your words carefully is treated as the work, and that includes the plain words you put on your own experience.
الإسراء
وَقُل لِّعِبَادِي يَقُولُواْ ٱلَّتِي هِيَ أَحۡسَنُۚ إِنَّ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنَ يَنزَغُ بَيۡنَهُمۡۚ إِنَّ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنَ كَانَ لِلۡإِنسَٰنِ عَدُوࣰّ ا مُّبِينࣰ ا
[Prophet], tell My servants to say what is best. Satan sows discord among them: Satan is a sworn enemy of man
Qur’an 17:53read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta analysis of brain imaging studies found that reinterpreting an upsetting situation drew on frontal and parietal control regions and reduced activity in the amygdala, the brain's threat detector. Simply labelling what is present is a lighter move than full reinterpretation, and the evidence for the light version is thinner than for the heavy one. So use the letters as a nudge towards distance and not as a proven technique in themselves.
Buhle JT, Silvers JA, Wager TD, Lopez R, Onyemekwu C, Kober H, Weber J, Ochsner KN. (2014). Cognitive reappraisal of emotion: a meta-analysis of human neuroimaging studies.. Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Naming what arrived gives you a small handle on it, and a handle is enough to stop it running you.
You do think before you act. The trouble is that you react first, and the thinking arrives just behind it.
The river is a way of talking, not a scene to imagine. You are not trying to see water, you are looking inward and noticing what turns up.
If you want to start noticing what goes on inside you, start with the urges. The pull to speak, to stand up, to say the cutting thing: those have a push behind them that thoughts and moods do not.