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Areas › Anger › Cool the body first
Knowing the direction you are aiming in helps. When you are frightened or furious the breath gets pulled in, fast and high in the chest, because the body is stocking up for effort. The sigh is the opposite movement, and it is what the body produces by itself once an episode ends. You are allowed to borrow it before the end arrives.
He gave you sleep as a reassurance from Him (Quran 8:11). Frightened bodies being settled through something as ordinary as sleep sits close to what a sigh does on a smaller scale.
الأنفال
إِذۡ يُغَشِّيكُمُ ٱلنُّعَاسَ أَمَنَةࣰ مِّنۡهُ وَيُنَزِّلُ عَلَيۡكُم مِّنَ ٱلسَّمَآءِ مَآءࣰ لِّيُطَهِّرَكُم بِهِۦ وَيُذۡهِبَ عَنكُمۡ رِجۡزَ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنِ وَلِيَرۡبِطَ عَلَىٰ قُلُوبِكُمۡ وَيُثَبِّتَ بِهِ ٱلۡأَقۡدَامَ
Remember when He gave you sleep as a reassurance from Him, and sent down water from the sky to cleanse you, to remove Satan’s pollution from you, to make your hearts strong and your feet firm
Qur’an 8:11read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analysis of heart rate variability biofeedback found that training slow breathing at a person's own resonance frequency produced moderate improvements in anxiety, depression and performance measures. Those protocols work by slowing the whole breath and drawing out the exhale, which is the effect being borrowed here. Most of those studies involved training across weeks, so one sigh is a small version of a larger thing.
Lehrer P, Kaur K, Sharma A, Shah K, Huseby R, Bhavsar J, Sgobba P, Zhang Y. (2020). Heart Rate Variability Biofeedback Improves Emotional and Physical Health and Performance: A Systematic Review and Meta Analysis.. Applied psychophysiology and biofeedback doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
You are producing on purpose the same signal the body sends when a threat has passed.
Anger pulls your attention towards whatever provoked it, the way a vacuum cleaner pulls at a curtain. Naming it that way makes it something happening to you rather than something wrong with you.
People arrive at anger work braced for a lecture and an instruction to breathe deeply. Handing them something they did not see coming buys you their attention.
You already own this one. Let out a sigh of relief right now, on purpose, and notice that your body knew exactly what to do.