Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Anger › Practising under provocation
You choose the intensity, which is what makes this a good place to start. Mild enough and you will barely notice it. A step further and you will feel the low hum of being looked at. Then watch what happens to that hum across an afternoon, because it usually fades well before the day is out.
Patiently endure what they say, ignore them politely (Quran 73:10). Politely ignoring a comment is a small thing to practise on a small day.
المزمل
وَٱصۡبِرۡ عَلَىٰ مَا يَقُولُونَ وَٱهۡجُرۡهُمۡ هَجۡرࣰ ا جَمِيلࣰ ا
patiently endure what they say, ignore them politely
Qur’an 73:10read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analytic review found that personality differences in aggression showed up mainly under provoking conditions and much less in neutral ones. You learn what you are sensitive to only when something touches it, which is the case for touching it a little on purpose. The review pools laboratory studies of aggression rather than of self consciousness in public.
Bettencourt BA, Talley A, Benjamin AJ, Valentine J. (2006). Personality and aggressive behavior under provoking and neutral conditions: a meta-analytic review.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Being looked at gets easier by being looked at, in doses you picked yourself.
Knowing why you are guarded rarely lowers the guard. What changes it is doing something different while the feeling is actually running.
Treat these as experiments rather than instructions. You are not obeying a programme, you are finding out what happens, and that difference changes how it feels to do them.
You do not need to get rid of your pride to stop being ruled by it. Having a sense of yourself is ordinary and useful, and the trouble starts only when every exchange has to feed it.