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Areas › Anger › Making it stick
You do not need anyone to provoke you for this. Notice the urge, breathe once, let it sit there without obeying it, and carry on. Two or three minutes gives you a dozen small trials, which is far more practice than waiting for life to hand you something to be angry about.
Seek help with steadfastness and prayer, though this is hard indeed for anyone but the humble (Quran 2:45). The verse does not pretend that staying with something difficult is easy.
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.
In a long term follow up of an internet delivered treatment for irritable bowel syndrome that combined exposure with mindfulness, most of the original participants were traced and their gains had held. That is a different problem entirely, and a follow up rather than a controlled comparison. What it supports is modest: practices built on staying with discomfort instead of escaping it can hold up over time.
Ljótsson B, Hedman E, Lindfors P, Hursti T, Lindefors N, Andersson G, Rück C. (2011). Long-term follow-up of internet-delivered exposure and mindfulness based treatment for irritable bowel syndrome.. Behaviour research and therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Urges fade on their own if you do not act on them, and this shows you that at low stakes.
If sitting still brings on flashbacks, panic or a sense of being far away from yourself, stop, and try it only with someone experienced alongside you.
Pick the news channel you cannot stand and watch ten minutes of it on purpose. The only job is to notice what rises in you and let it go by.
There is an old story about two wolves fighting inside a person, and the winner turns out to be whichever one gets fed. It is only a story, but the arithmetic in it is right.
If you held back at four o'clock and then snapped at seven, the holding back still happened. A later slip does not reach backwards and cancel it.