Areas › Anger › Equanimity and perspective
Change the question you ask yourself. Not how badly do I want to stay calm, but what have I actually practised for the moment it starts.
Wanting is not a plan. Decide in advance the words you will use, the room you will step into, the person you will ring afterwards. Rehearsed things are still there when your wanting has thinned out to nothing, which is exactly when you need them.
Qur’an and Sunnah
it is He who made the night and day follow each other, so anyone who wishes may be mindful or show gratitude (Quran 25:62). The occasion comes round daily because the practice is meant to be repeated, not summoned once.
وَهُوَ ٱلَّذِي جَعَلَ ٱلَّيۡلَ وَٱلنَّهَارَ خِلۡفَةࣰ لِّمَنۡ أَرَادَ أَن يَذَّكَّرَ أَوۡ أَرَادَ شُكُورࣰ ا
it is He who made the night and day follow each other- so anyone who wishes may be mindful or show gratitude
Qur’an 25:62read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A brief attention training exercise improved children's ability to wait for a larger reward, evidence that attention itself responds to practice rather than being a fixed endowment. It was a controlled experiment with children on a laboratory task, so the claim it supports is modest: the capacity sitting under self control can be trained. How far that carries into a heated argument was not tested.
Murray J, Theakston A, Wells A. (2016). Can the attention training technique turn one marshmallow into two? Improving children's ability to delay gratification.. Behaviour research and therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Under pressure you reach for what you have already done before, not for what you meant to do.
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
Practising the perfect reply in your head feels like letting off steam. It works more like rehearsal, and what you rehearse gets easier to perform.
You do not actually know what they are about to say, or why they did it. Swapping the finished sentence in your head for help me understand costs nothing and changes the whole exchange.
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.