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Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
People describe it as being at the wheel, and it turns out to be a better reason to keep going than any argument anyone could make to you. So give it a second when it arrives. Practices that carry a small reward of their own survive the week, and practices that carry only duty tend to quietly stop.
If a person is patient and forgives, this is one of the greatest things (Quran 42:43). If holding steady left you quietly pleased, that is not vanity, something large happened in a small way.
الشورى
وَلَمَن صَبَرَ وَغَفَرَ إِنَّ ذَٰلِكَ لَمِنۡ عَزۡمِ ٱلۡأُمُورِ
though if a person is patient and forgives, this is one of the greatest things
Qur’an 42:43read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Pooling 48 samples and over 21,000 people, habitually reinterpreting situations went with more positive feeling and greater life satisfaction, while habitually holding expression in went with more depression and anxiety. The pleasant side of choosing your response is not sentimental, it shows up in how people rate their own lives. These are associations across people, so they cannot tell you what one afternoon of practice will do for you.
Hu T, Zhang D, Wang J, Mistry R, Ran G, Wang X. (2014). Relation between emotion regulation and mental health: a meta-analysis review.. Psychological reports doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A practice that feels good at the time is one you will actually do again.
Offer a practice as a question rather than an instruction. What do you think it would be like to wake yourself up once a day? That is a very different sentence from you should.
A routine only helps you while you still mean it. Every so often, ask whether you are keeping a habit because you chose it or because you stopped noticing it.
If your whole plan is to keep your mouth shut next time, ask yourself how. Most of us go blank at that question, and the blank is worth more attention than another promise to try harder.