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Areas › Anger › Growing empathy
Advice like be more understanding gives you nothing to practise. Advice like match their pace when they speak gives you something you can do on a Tuesday and get better at by Friday. Whether the mechanism behind it is what anyone claims matters less than whether you can repeat it, and it is the small repeatable things that accumulate.
and forbid common kindnesses (Quran 107:7). What is condemned is withholding the ordinary small gesture, which sets the daily scale as the real measure.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
In a field experiment with 139 working adults, half of them randomly assigned to begin a loving-kindness practice, the practice raised daily positive emotions, and those emotions in turn built personal resources over time. The lesson worth taking is about small repeated practice adding up. It is one study of one practice, and what it built came slowly rather than dramatically.
Fredrickson BL, Cohn MA, Coffey KA, Pek J, Finkel SM. (2008). Open hearts build lives: positive emotions, induced through loving-kindness meditation, build consequential personal resources.. Journal of personality and social psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Concrete actions can be practised and vague intentions cannot.
Four ordinary things take the edge off a hot temper: being touched by someone you trust, eating with people, moving your body hard enough to breathe, and sitting still for a few minutes a day.
You can feel for the child in front of you and still keep the consequence you set. Being moved was never meant to be the thing that decides.
There is a particular relief in hearing a room of strangers admit the same frightened thing you have never said aloud. It is why groups reach people that advice does not.