Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Anger › The moment before you snap
Managing the breath turns it into one more thing to get right, and for some people close attention to the body winds them up rather than settling them. As an anchor it works differently. The mind wanders off, you notice, you come back. The coming back is the practice, not the staying.
Seek help with steadfastness and prayer (Quran 2:45). What steadies a person is something regular and undramatic to return to, rather than one heroic effort.
البقرة
وَٱسۡتَعِينُواْ بِٱلصَّبۡرِ وَٱلصَّلَوٰةِۚ وَإِنَّهَا لَكَبِيرَةٌ إِلَّا عَلَى ٱلۡخَٰشِعِينَ
Seek help with steadfastness and prayer- though this is hard indeed for anyone but the humble
Qur’an 2:45read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Across randomised studies, training people to breathe slowly at their own resonance rate, with feedback, produced moderate improvements in anxiety, low mood and performance measures. So deliberate breathing does have evidence behind it. It is a different practice from this one, where the breath is only somewhere to rest attention, and that use has not been tested in those trials.
Lehrer P, Kaur K, Sharma A, Shah K, Huseby R, Bhavsar J, Sgobba P, Zhang Y. (2020). Heart Rate Variability Biofeedback Improves Emotional and Physical Health and Performance: A Systematic Review and Meta Analysis.. Applied psychophysiology and biofeedback doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Having somewhere plain to return to makes a wandering mind much easier to notice than watching an empty field.
If focusing on your breathing makes you panicky, which happens to plenty of people, use an outside anchor such as sound instead.
Anger can feel good for a moment, righteous and awake and clear. That warm rush is exactly why it is hard to interrupt at the only point where interrupting works.
Most of us think there are two things to do with anger: hold it in or let it out. There is a third, which is to stop, stay still, and watch it without doing either.
A face read quickly is a face read badly. Before you answer what you think you saw, allow that the flat look might be tiredness, or worry about something else entirely.