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Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
A physical reminder beats an intention, because an intention needs you to remember it and a pebble does not. Anything mildly odd and continuous does the job: a band round the wrist, a ring on a different finger, a watch turned face down. Pick something you cannot help noticing but could easily ignore for a minute.
Who keep up the prayer; who give secretly and openly from what We have provided for them; who repel evil with good (Quran 13:22). Small steady things, kept up, are what hold a person to a shape.
الرعد
وَٱلَّذِينَ صَبَرُواْ ٱبۡتِغَآءَ وَجۡهِ رَبِّهِمۡ وَأَقَامُواْ ٱلصَّلَوٰةَ وَأَنفَقُواْ مِمَّا رَزَقۡنَٰهُمۡ سِرࣰّ ا وَعَلَانِيَةࣰ وَيَدۡرَءُونَ بِٱلۡحَسَنَةِ ٱلسَّيِّئَةَ أُوْلَٰٓئِكَ لَهُمۡ عُقۡبَى ٱلدَّارِ
who remain steadfast through their desire for the face of their Lord; who keep up the prayer; who give secretly and openly from what We have provided for them; who repel evil with good. These will have the reward of the [true] home
Qur’an 13:22read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Across two samples, people higher in trait mindfulness reported less anger, hostility and aggression, with less brooding partly explaining the link. That supports staying in contact with the present as something worth cultivating, and the design was cross sectional, so it cannot say which came first. Nothing in it tests pebbles or wristbands, which are only ways of making that contact easier to keep.
Borders A, Earleywine M, Jajodia A. (2010). Could mindfulness decrease anger, hostility, and aggression by decreasing rumination?. Aggressive behavior doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A small steady signal from your body keeps calling your attention back without you having to remember to call it.
Choose something that can only irritate you, never anything that could break skin or bruise, and skip the pebble altogether if you have diabetes or reduced feeling in your feet.
You are free while you are still weighing something up, and once you have chosen you carry that choice until the next one comes round. So the useful thing is to have more of those moments, not to make one perfect decision.
You are not stuck with the temper you have had so far. Reactions are learnt, which is unglamorous news and also the hopeful kind.
Knowing you have other options and taking one are different things. Somewhere in there is the moment the choice actually gets made, and that moment is what you want to train.