Your body treats an insult with the same urgency as a threat to your safety, and the two are not the same at all. Saying that to yourself plainly, while it is happening, takes some of the false emergency out of it.

What the research says

In a laboratory experiment, people who had just been made angry and were then asked to reappraise the event, or to distract themselves, ended up in a different emotional state from those told to think it over analytically. The instruction they were given changed where they landed. It was one recalled event in a lab, so read it as encouragement to have a line ready rather than a measure of how much that line will help.

Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.