Practices

Every practice in the library, in one list. Narrow it by how long you have, who it is written for, and where you are right now.

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716 practices

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Anger often grows after the moment that started it, with nothing new added. The system amplifies its own signal, insisting that this is big, pay attention, react.

That is how you can leave a conversation at a five and reach an eight by the time you get to the car. Knowing it climbs on its own lets you plan for…

Five minutesThe moment before you snapCoreQur’an 2:45One line of research

The alarm listens to your body as well as to the world, so once you are stirred up the stirring becomes its own evidence. Replaying the scene keeps feeding it.

This is why anger stays up half the night long after the other person has gone to bed. The rehearsal feels like processing, but mostly it keeps the…

Five minutesThe moment before you snapCoreQur’an 23:97One line of research

The black and white thinking that shows up in anger is not proof that something in you is broken. It is what a threat detector does, and threat detectors are built to be crude.

Calling it a distortion invites shame, and shame usually feeds the next flare rather than shrinking it. It helps more to say the thinking did its job…

Five minutesThe moment before you snapCoreQur’an 3:134One line of research

There is a stretch after anger fires when a person is feeling rather than thinking. In it, only information that matches the emotion gets through, so reasoning at yourself or at anyone else is wasted breath.

What does land in that stretch is physical and relational: a slower breath, a change of room, a hand on your own chest, a kind tone that asks for…

Five minutesThe moment before you snapCoreQur’an 12:24

Looking for a whole subject rather than a single practice? Start from the nine areas.

The fear underneath anger

Tolerate distress

The cost of avoiding

Moving your body

Obsessions and compulsions

What worry does

Reading, numbers and learning differences

Feeling from the inside

Emotions as signals

Breathing

When you use something to cope

Breaking the worry loop

Being seen and judged

Treatment and medication

Practising under provocation

Bringing the future closer

Structure and routine

Growing empathy

Exercise, food and other supports

Remembering to do it

Question the thought

Posture and how you carry yourself

When you go numb

Making it stick

When anger turns to harm

Letting it out safely

Self-compassion

Facing it a step at a time

Living with uncertainty

What you are actually defending

Rest and pacing

Panic and the body

Anger, alcohol and the body

Use your strengths

Righteous anger and perfectionism

One line of research

You can sit on a bench a few feet from a waterfall and be perfectly safe. Step in and you go over. Feeling something powerful is not the danger, and getting swept into it is.

This is why the aim is never to keep away from what upsets you. You can be right up close to a feeling, hearing it roar, and still be the one on the…

Five minutesThe moment before you snapMindfulnessQur’an 79:40One line of research

Trying to control what cannot be controlled is what makes a person feel out of control. Let the uncontrollable part be, and a surprising amount of control comes back.

Balance something on your fingertip and you will feel it: the harder you chase it, the more it wobbles. Feelings and thoughts behave the same way.…

Five minutesThe moment before you snapMindfulnessQur’an 23:98One line of research

The river is different every minute. The one sitting on the bank is the same one who sat there ten years ago, and will be there in ten more.

This is the part that offers something to people whose sense of themselves rises and falls with how they were treated that day. If who you are is the…

Five minutesThe moment before you snapMindfulnessQur’an 114:1One line of research

There is a kind of mindfulness that means sinking right into a moment, and another that means stepping back from it. When you are angry, you want the second one.

Losing yourself in the taste of a coffee is a lovely practice and it is not this one. Going all the way into a feeling makes it bigger, which is…

Five minutesThe moment before you snapMindfulnessQur’an 3:134One line of research

You did not calm yourself down. You sat still and watched, and calm turned up. It is worth having that the right way round.

If you credit your own effort for the calm, you will reach for that effort next time you are furious, and it will not be there. Then the failure…

Five minutesThe moment before you snapMindfulnessQur’an 7:154One line of research

Some signals cannot be acted on. Ringing in the ears, an old ache, a resentment about something long finished: the alarm is real and there is nothing to answer it with.

Fighting a signal you cannot switch off lays a second misery on top of the first. People who live well with long term pain tend to do something else…

Five minutesThe moment before you snapMindfulnessQur’an 21:37One line of research

Anger tells you to say the thing. Fear tells you to leave. You can feel all of it and still not do what it asks, and that gap is the whole skill.

Try naming the urge in your head as it arrives: this is the urge to send the message. Named, it stops being the only available next step and becomes…

A minuteTolerate distressDBT skillsQur’an 42:43One line of research

Let your face go. Unclench the jaw, let the lips lift very slightly, and let the loosening carry back through your head and shoulders.

You are not pretending to be happy and nobody has to see it. The face holds a lot of the tension of a bad state, and it is one of the few parts you…

A minuteTolerate distressDBT skillsQur’an 10:12One line of research

Let your hands fall open, palms up, on your lap or at your sides, and breathe there for a minute. It is oddly hard to stay in full fight with open hands.

Anger lives in the grip as much as anywhere. Opening the hands removes one part of what the body is preparing to do, and the rest of the system tends…

A minuteTolerate distressDBT skillsQur’an 70:5One line of research

You are allowed to put something down. Put it down with a time to pick it up again: Thursday morning, with my therapist, not tonight.

Without the appointment, setting it aside quietly turns into never touching it, and the thing keeps all its power by never being looked at. With the…

A minuteTolerate distressDBT skillsQur’an 20:130One line of research

Sometimes the thing that stops your tears is an order somebody gave you decades ago, and you are the one carrying it out now. One woman found her father's words sitting behind a habit of wiping her face dry the moment she cried.

That is worth knowing because it changes who the rule belongs to. It was his voice, in her hands, running long after he had gone. Naming the source…

Five minutesTolerate distressBody basedQur’an 16:127One line of research

Whether a feeling is nowhere to be found or far too much, the questions are the same: what breath, what movement, what sentence, what person helps me stay with this?

Numbness and overwhelm look like opposites and they are both a problem of not being able to stay with the material. The same supports work in either…

Five minutesTolerate distressBody basedQur’an 94:6One line of research

Anger wants the body to do something, so let it. Breathe deeper and higher into the chest, stand up, press both palms hard into a wall, walk on the spot, push down through your feet.

Pressing against something solid gives the mobilisation an outlet with nothing broken and nobody hurt. Keep going until the charge drops a little,…

Five minutesTolerate distressBody basedQur’an 84:6One line of research

A hard feeling is not damage and it is not a bad attitude. It is a feeling, meant to be felt, and the only real question is at what pace.

Plenty of people were raised to treat their own sadness or anger as a failure of character, so the feeling arrives and shame arrives just behind it.…

Twenty minutesTolerate distressDBT skillsQur’an 21:83One line of research

Putting a film on, reading, letting the internet have an hour, all of it counts as a real skill when you choose it on purpose and know what you are choosing it for.

The version that hurts is the one you fall into without deciding and feel ashamed of afterwards. Choosing changes the whole thing: I am not up to…

Twenty minutesTolerate distressDBT skillsQur’an 73:10One line of research

Some people are not frightened of a place or an animal. They are frightened of their own racing heart, their own tears, their own anger, and it behaves like any other fear: it grows on avoidance and shrinks on careful contact.

That framing is useful because it tells you what to do next. You do not have to understand where it came from before anything can change. What you…

Twenty minutesTolerate distressBody basedQur’an 2:155One line of research