Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
Anger is a bit like fingernails where claws used to be. Still there, still occasionally useful, mostly not what the situation is asking for.
Nearly everything you meet in a week wants something else: a clear sentence, a delay, a phone call in the morning. The old equipment does not know that, so it keeps offering the old solution. Naming the mismatch as it happens, even under your breath, takes some of the authority out of the impulse.
Qur’an and Sunnah
repel evil with what is better and your enemy will become as close as an old and valued friend (Quran 41:34). The better response is put forward as the one that actually gets somewhere.
وَلَا تَسۡتَوِي ٱلۡحَسَنَةُ وَلَا ٱلسَّيِّئَةُۚ ٱدۡفَعۡ بِٱلَّتِي هِيَ أَحۡسَنُ فَإِذَا ٱلَّذِي بَيۡنَكَ وَبَيۡنَهُۥ عَدَٰوَةࣱ كَأَنَّهُۥ وَلِيٌّ حَمِيمࣱ
Good and evil cannot be equal. [Prophet], repel evil with what is better and your enemy will become as close as an old and valued friend
Qur’an 41:34read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a substudy of a cardiac trial, hostility and anger predicted poorer health-related quality of life, and part of that ran through a weaker sense that life is comprehensible and manageable. Carrying it at a high level appears to cost something across ordinary living. People were measured at one point in time, so which came first is not established.
Julkunen J, Ahlström R. (2006). Hostility, anger, and sense of coherence as predictors of health-related quality of life. Results of an ASCOT substudy.. Journal of psychosomatic research doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
An impulse loses some of its grip once you can see it is answering a situation you are not actually in.
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
Not all hostile looking anger is hostile. Some people are not reading malice into a situation, they simply cannot tell what the other person meant and fall back on assuming the worst.
In long-running anger the alarm is not broken. It is set too sensitive and too loud, which is two things to adjust rather than a character to fix.
Letting it all out does not drain the anger off. Every rehearsal of the row, out loud or in your head, is practice, and practice makes the response easier to reach next time.