Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
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.
Sensitivity is how little it takes to set you off. Volume is how big the response gets once it starts. Sleep, food, pain, alcohol and how much you have been going over things all move the first. Practising what you do in the opening seconds moves the second. Both answer to attention, which is what makes this workable.
Qur’an and Sunnah
make your response proportionate, but it is best to stand fast (Quran 16:126). Proportion is exactly the dial being described.
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 review of this field concluded that difficulties regulating emotion turn up across a wide range of mental health problems and are a plausible maintaining factor and treatment target, while noting the evidence is largely correlational. Treating anger as a regulation problem rather than a character problem sits comfortably with how the field has come to think. Largely correlational means the causal story is still open.
Berking M, Wupperman P. (2012). Emotion regulation and mental health: recent findings, current challenges, and future directions.. Current opinion in psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A setting can be adjusted, and adjustments are something you can practise.
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
Some anger is really about being left. It flares when someone pulls away, goes quiet or seems less interested, and it comes out as an accusation rather than as the fear it is.
Some anger arrives with an argument already inside it: that they disrespected you, that this is not how you are meant to be treated. It burns cooler than the sudden kind and it lasts much longer.
A certain wariness is standard equipment. Nothing in this work is trying to leave you soft and open to whatever comes along.