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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451 practices

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You do not have to reflect back everything a person just told you. Pick up the part that carries the weight and say that much.

A long, careful summary can flatten what someone has just risked saying. If the heart of it is that he feels defeated and frightened of never being…

Five minutesEmotions as signalsEmotionally focusedQur’an 15:97One line of research

When you are already angry, imagining your way into someone else's head asks the tired part of you to do the heavy lifting. Start with your body instead: look at their face, let your breathing and your shoulders come closer to theirs.

Perspective taking is a fine skill on a calm day. In the middle of a row it tends to slide into arguing with a version of the other person you have…

A minuteGrowing empathyBody basedQur’an 9:128One line of research

If you have gone numb around other people's pain, the numbness almost certainly started as protection. It kept you upright at a time when feeling all of it would have flattened you.

The trouble is that it does not switch itself off when the danger passes. You find yourself unmoved in front of someone you love, and then you blame…

Five minutesGrowing empathyBody basedQur’an 6:54One line of research

If you keep saying yes and then feeling furious about it, the problem may not be that you care too much. Often it is that you cannot bear anyone being displeased with you.

The two look identical from outside and they need completely different answers. Genuine feeling for someone is warm and tiring. Fear of disapproval…

Five minutesGrowing empathyCBTQur’an 76:9

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

Tolerate distress

The moment before you snap

Get started

Structure and routine

Remembering to do it

When you use something to cope

Exercise, food and other supports

When everything feels flat

Bringing the future closer

Food, caffeine and fuel

Making it stick

Letting it out safely

Growing empathy

When anger turns to harm

Practising under provocation

Facing it a step at a time

Self-compassion

What you are actually defending

Feeling from the inside

Emotions as signals

Anger, alcohol and the body

Living with uncertainty

Getting assessed and diagnosed

Question the thought

Rest and pacing

Righteous anger and perfectionism

Being seen and judged

Use your strengths

One line of research

Underneath both versions sits the same small dread: somebody being displeased with you. That is the thing to practise surviving, and it does get easier.

Start where it is cheap. Send back the wrong order. Say you would rather not, once, to a person who will be mildly annoyed and nothing worse. Sit…

Five minutesGrowing empathyCBTQur’an 7:156One line of research

After you lose it, the sentence you say to yourself matters. I have no self control leads somewhere much worse than I have not drilled that one yet.

Shame closes the subject. You stop looking at what happened, and what happened is precisely the material you need. Try a short unglamorous review…

Five minutesEquanimity and perspectiveCoreQur’an 57:23One line of research

Every one of us is trying to tame ourselves, which no other animal is attempting. Finding it hard is the ordinary result, not a sign that something is wrong with you in particular.

This is meant to take the shame out, not the responsibility. Harm still needs repairing and apologies still need making. But if some part of you…

Five minutesEquanimity and perspectiveCoreQur’an 3:190One line of research

Losing your grip has a sequence too, running the other way: the hold loosens, thinking thins out, and then you are simply angry. Finding where it loosened is more use than going over how it ended.

Work backwards from the flare. The slip is usually earlier and duller than the shouting: a skipped meal, a second replay of the conversation in the…

Five minutesEquanimity and perspectiveCoreQur’an 10:24One line of research

Fighting your own anger tends to make it louder. The part of you that flares does better treated as something to work with than something to defeat.

In the moment that can be as small as thinking, there you are, instead of, not this again. Pushing it under works for a while and then it arrives…

Five minutesEquanimity and perspectiveCoreQur’an 15:88One line of research

Not all anger is a reaction to something. Sometimes a person goes looking, standing exactly where someone is likely to snap, and it is worth being honest with yourself if that is you.

The signs are small: replying to a comment you could have scrolled past, holding your ground where nothing is at stake, choosing the route where the…

Five minutesEquanimity and perspectiveCoreQur’an 22:46One line of research

Being steady about something does not mean you approve of it, and it does not mean you have dropped your claim. It means you have stopped fighting the fact that it happened.

People hear acceptance and think they are being asked to say it was alright. Nothing of the sort. You can be perfectly clear that it was wrong and…

Five minutesEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 57:23One line of research

Sitting practice teaches four useful things about anger: everything passes, the senses are calmer ground than the story, you do not have to attend to every thought, and you are not the words you use about yourself.

Take them one at a time. When something flares, the quickest of the four is usually the second: put your attention on your feet or the sound of the…

Five minutesEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 18:45One line of research

Nobody has to send kind wishes to the person who hurt them, least of all on somebody else's schedule. If that step is being pushed on you, you can decline it and keep the rest of the practice.

Reaching for warmth toward someone who did real harm can bring shame, or a flood of the original event, or the queasy sense of having been talked…

Five minutesEquanimity and perspectiveMindfulnessQur’an 12:86One line of research

The aim is not to become someone with no force in them. It is to get a harness on the force and point it at something worth doing.

Anger usually knows something true: this was unfair, this matters to me, this cannot carry on. Keep that part and drop the delivery. The energy can…

Twenty minutesEquanimity and perspectiveCoreQur’an 12:86One line of research

Nobody arrives with restraint already fitted. If holding your tongue feels like unnatural work, that is what it is for everyone, and it says nothing about what you are underneath.

This matters because the story you tell about a flare decides what you do next. Broken means give up quietly. Unbuilt means pick one situation, the…

LongerEquanimity and perspectiveCoreQur’an 53:39One line of research

The old reaction does not get erased. You lay a new one over the top of it, and on a tired or unfamiliar day the old one can still come through.

So a flare after months of doing well is not everything undone. That is what relearning looks like, and it tends to turn up alongside broken sleep,…

LongerEquanimity and perspectiveCoreQur’an 3:191One line of research

There is motion sitting inside the word emotion. Big feelings come out through the body, so if you cannot keep still while you are grieving, that is the feeling moving rather than something going wrong with you.

Think how strange it would be if someone heard they had come into a fortune and just said thank you and carried on with the morning. Joy gets up and…

A minuteLetting it out safelyGriefQur’an 12:84One line of research

Punching something to get the anger out is the piece of grief advice that gets argued over most, and the honest answer is that hitting rarely leaves a person calmer.

Plenty of good people will tell you a bag is better than a wall or a face, and there is something in that. What has not held up is the older idea…

Five minutesLetting it out safelyGriefQur’an 14:26One line of research

Give the anger a room rather than a target. Music up loud, walk fast, dance badly, shake your arms out until something in you settles.

Some children's grief centres keep a padded room where a child can go in and move however they need to, with nothing to hit and nothing to break.…

Twenty minutesLetting it out safelyGriefQur’an 10:12One line of research

Write the exact thing you are furious about on a paper plate, tape it to the wall, and throw wet cotton balls at it. It sounds childish, and it does more than swinging at nothing.

Half the good of it is in the writing. Vague anger has to become a sentence before it can go on the plate, and reading that sentence back usually…

Twenty minutesLetting it out safelyGriefQur’an 38:41One line of research