Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
An alarm that goes off at every shadow is a nuisance, but one that misses the real intruder is worse. Your system was tuned with that trade in mind.
So overreacting is a setting rather than a defect, and it is a setting that once kept people alive. What it means now is that the alarm will be wrong often, which is the part needing attention. You are not after a quieter alarm so much as a habit of checking before you act on it.
Qur’an and Sunnah
make your response proportionate, but it is best to stand fast (Quran 16:126). Proportion has to be instructed precisely because the first impulse does not arrive in proportion.
وَإِنۡ عَاقَبۡتُمۡ فَعَاقِبُواْ بِمِثۡلِ مَا عُوقِبۡتُم بِهِۦۖ وَلَئِن صَبَرۡتُمۡ لَهُوَ خَيۡرࣱ لِّلصَّٰبِرِينَ
If you [believers] have to respond to an attack, make your response proportionate, but it is best to stand fast
Qur’an 16:126read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis combining 241 effect sizes found habitual rumination, avoidance and suppression more strongly tied to anxiety, depression, eating and substance problems, while reappraisal, problem solving and acceptance showed protective associations. What you do after the alarm sounds is where the difference sits. The relationships are correlational, so they show a pattern rather than settling the direction.
Aldao A, Nolen-Hoeksema S, Schweizer S. (2010). Emotion-regulation strategies across psychopathology: A meta-analytic review.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A system built to avoid missing danger will hand you false alarms, so checking is more use than trusting.
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
Sometimes the row is not really about the row. Some people reach for conflict because it is the one thing that makes them feel properly awake.
The part of you that detects threat is very old and does not take instructions in words. Telling yourself to calm down mostly demonstrates that.
The energy behind your anger is not waste. People who feel strongly about what is wrong are often the ones who end up changing something.