Areas › Worry and anxiety › Breaking the worry loop
Sourness, shutting down, snapping at everyone: these are as often worry as they are attitude. The person is not giving you a hard time, they are having one.
This matters because of what happens next. Read it as rudeness and the house responds with punishment, which adds to the load that produced the snapping in the first place. Read it as anxiety and you can ask what is going on underneath, later, when things are quiet. Consequences may still be needed for how someone speaks to you. They just work better when nobody has decided the person is simply difficult.
Qur’an and Sunnah
If a prompting from Satan should stir you, seek refuge with God (Quran 41:36). It is given in the middle of guidance about responding well to provocation, which is exactly where this lands.
وَإِمَّا يَنزَغَنَّكَ مِنَ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنِ نَزۡغࣱ فَٱسۡتَعِذۡ بِٱللَّهِۖ إِنَّهُۥ هُوَ ٱلسَّمِيعُ ٱلۡعَلِيمُ
If a prompting from Satan should stir you, seek refuge with God: He is the All Hearing and the All Knowing
Qur’an 41:36read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a cross sectional study, rumination accounted for part of the relationship between post traumatic stress symptoms and angry reactions. Going over things internally sits between distress and the temper that shows on the outside. The analysis was cross sectional, so the direction of that relationship is not established.
Christ NM, Contractor AA, Wang X, Elhai JD. (2020). The mediating effect of rumination between posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms and anger reactions.. Psychological trauma : theory, research, practice and policy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Treating anxious irritability as bad character adds pressure to what is already too much.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Most decisions are not sealed. Choose, run with it for a set time, then look again and change course if it is clearly wrong. Knowing there is a review date takes a great deal of weight off the choice.
Slow breathing and loosening your muscles are not decoration. A body that is braced keeps telling the mind there is something to brace for, so unbracing it takes away part of the evidence.
You will not talk a driven person out of worrying, so give the worry a better job. If someone frets about their revision, have them fret about whether they are also taking breaks and sleeping, since those are part of the revision.