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Areas › Anger › The moment before you snap
This is easier to practise with praise, because praise feels harmless. Notice how much you want the good tag and you begin to see why the bad one has such a grip: they are the same appetite. Nobody drops it altogether. It does loosen, though, and the looser it gets the less an insult has to work with.
Be tolerant and command what is right: pay no attention to foolish people (Quran 7:199). Not everything said to you has to be weighed and answered.
الأعراف
خُذِ ٱلۡعَفۡوَ وَأۡمُرۡ بِٱلۡعُرۡفِ وَأَعۡرِضۡ عَنِ ٱلۡجَٰهِلِينَ
Be tolerant and command what is right: pay no attention to foolish people
Qur’an 7:199read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A developmental study comparing people aged 10 to 23 found that emotional reactivity fell with age while the knack of reinterpreting a situation improved, and sensitivity to rejection peaked in the middle teens. How much another person's opinion stings is measurable, and it shifts. Different people were compared at one point in time rather than followed over years, so it shows a pattern rather than a path.
Silvers JA, McRae K, Gabrieli JD, Gross JJ, Remy KA, Ochsner KN. (2012). Age-related differences in emotional reactivity, regulation, and rejection sensitivity in adolescence.. Emotion (Washington, D.C.) doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Insults sting in proportion to how much you need praise, so loosening one loosens the other.
There is a kind of mindfulness that means sinking right into a moment, and another that means stepping back from it. When you are angry, you want the second one.
You do think before you act. The trouble is that you react first, and the thinking arrives just behind it.
In the heat of it there is no middle ground on offer. Asking yourself to see the grey areas mid argument is asking for something your mind is not running just then.