Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
The nervous system grows in the womb out of the same layer as your skin. Sensing and being touched come from one origin, which is part of why threat is felt on the surface of you.
The biology does not have to be exact for the picture to be useful. Attention paid to the surface, the temperature of your hands, the tightness across your back, the air on your face, gets you information earlier than watching your thoughts. When thinking has gone unreliable, this is usually the door that still opens.
Qur’an and Sunnah
he is fretful when misfortune touches him (Quran 70:20). It is put as something that touches, which is where it tends to be felt.
إِذَا مَسَّهُ ٱلشَّرُّ جَزُوعࣰ ا
he is fretful when misfortune touches him
Qur’an 70:20read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a randomised controlled trial, brief internet-delivered programmes teaching mindful awareness of emotion reduced problematic anger, doing about as well as programmes teaching people to reinterpret situations. Training attention on what is happening in your body holds up next to the more familiar thinking-based route. Both were supported programmes running over weeks, so this is not evidence about noticing alone with nothing else in place.
Bjureberg J, Ojala O, Berg A, Edvardsson E, Kolbeinsson Ö, Molander O, Morin E, Nordgren L, Palme K, Särnholm J, Wedin L, Rück C, Gross JJ, Hesser H. (2023). Targeting maladaptive anger with brief therapist-supported internet-delivered emotion regulation treatments: A randomized controlled trial.. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
The body registers a threat before the thinking arrives, so it is the earlier place to look.
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
How you explain anger decides how you handle it. Call it a flaw and you will end up asking for suppression. Call it an alarm firing too fast and you will end up teaching skills.
Somebody who never raises their voice is not necessarily calm. Some of the worst outbursts come from people who held everything in until a setting appeared where it was allowed.
Anger takes speech in one of two directions. Some of us go silent and let the face carry it, others turn suddenly fluent and very precise.