Areas › Anger › Equanimity and perspective
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 one that catches you most often, and work on that single thing for a while.
Qur’an and Sunnah
that man will only have what he has worked towards (Quran 53:39). What you build is genuinely yours, which is a fairer measure than whatever temperament you happened to be given.
وَأَن لَّيۡسَ لِلۡإِنسَٰنِ إِلَّا مَا سَعَىٰ
that man will only have what he has worked towards
Qur’an 53:39read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A small pilot trial adapted mindfulness based cognitive therapy for people high in neuroticism, meaning general vulnerability to stress, and found it acceptable and promising against an online self help comparison. The interesting part is the assumption behind it: a trait people treat as fixed was worth treating as trainable. It was a pilot with a small sample, so this is a hint and not a finding.
Armstrong L, Rimes KA. (2016). Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Neuroticism (Stress Vulnerability): A Pilot Randomized Study.. Behavior therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Treating the gap as something not yet built keeps you practising, while treating it as a defect stops you.
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
This is not a milestone you pass. The two year old's version goes, then a version comes back at twenty two, and again at fifty two, wearing whatever clothes that stage of life provides.
The same cup is a drinking cup at home and contraband in a prison, because the role you are standing in has already decided what you are looking at.
Queueing, splitting a bill fairly, sharing a road with strangers: all of this is recent. We have had a few thousand years of practice at it, against a much longer history of living another way.