Areas › Anger › Equanimity and perspective
The hand you put up to fend someone off is already halfway to a fist. There is no clean place to stop once the movement is underway, which is why the early moment is the one worth having.
In practice that moment is smaller than you expect: the first flick of heat, the sentence forming that starts with you always. That is when stepping back or asking for a minute still works. Once you are explaining why you are right, the thing has its own momentum and you are carried along with it.
Qur’an and Sunnah
those who say, when afflicted with a calamity, We belong to God and to Him we shall return (Quran 2:156). A short line you already know can fill the gap where the next sharp sentence would have gone.
ٱلَّذِينَ إِذَآ أَصَٰبَتۡهُم مُّصِيبَةࣱ قَالُوٓاْ إِنَّا لِلَّهِ وَإِنَّآ إِلَيۡهِ رَٰجِعُونَ
those who say, when afflicted with a calamity, ‘We belong to God and to Him we shall return.’
Qur’an 2:156read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a multilevel study, both a person's general leaning towards mindfulness and their state in the moment predicted lower aggressiveness, and dwelling on the anger accounted for much of both paths. The lever it points to is the rehearsal that keeps a flare going once it starts. The design is observational, so it cannot show which way the causation runs.
Eisenlohr-Moul TA, Peters JR, Pond RS, DeWall CN. (2016). Both trait and state mindfulness predict lower aggressiveness via anger rumination: A multilevel mediation analysis.. Mindfulness doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Stopping something before it is moving takes much less of you than stopping it halfway.
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
Light bounces off a face, lands at the back of your eye, and becomes a signal your brain assembles into a person. What you see is a reconstruction, a very good one, and never quite the thing itself.
There are two different jobs here. One is getting through the flare when it is on you. The other is quietly changing, over months, what counts as a flare in the first place.
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.