Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
Some triggers make no sense because the memory attached to them is long gone while the alarm is still wired in. A tone of voice, a particular shirt, the smell of dinner burning.
If you find yourself furious out of all proportion, look at the features rather than the story. What did that moment sound like, look like, feel like on your skin? People often cannot say why something sets them off, and that is not evasion. Once you know the feature, you can see it coming, which takes most of its power away.
Qur’an and Sunnah
If a prompting from Satan should stir you, seek refuge with God (Quran 41:36). The prompting is not explained or argued with, only met with a turn towards God.
وَإِمَّا يَنزَغَنَّكَ مِنَ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنِ نَزۡغࣱ فَٱسۡتَعِذۡ بِٱللَّهِۖ إِنَّهُۥ هُوَ ٱلسَّمِيعُ ٱلۡعَلِيمُ
If a prompting from Satan should stir you, seek refuge with God: He is the All Hearing and the All Knowing
Qur’an 41:36read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis of imaging studies found that fear extinction, placebo and deliberate regulation of negative feeling all draw on overlapping prefrontal control regions. Old learned alarms are workable, and the same machinery serves several routes into them. Shared brain regions do not tell you which route will suit you, only that this is not fixed.
Diekhof EK, Geier K, Falkai P, Gruber O. (2011). Fear is only as deep as the mind allows: a coordinate-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies on the regulation of negative affect.. NeuroImage doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
An old association fires without needing your memory of where it came from.
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
Before you decide someone is having a go at you, go looking for the boring physical explanation. A good deal of the time it is right there.
Anger looks at the person and edits out the room. It is the man who is rude, never the traffic, the deadline or the night he spent awake.
Set the terms of a break while nobody is angry: what you will say, how long you will take, where you will go, and that you will not drive. Then it is a shared arrangement rather than something you do to the other person.