Areas › Anger › Cool the body first
Anger has a shape you can learn: jaw tightening, breathing heavier, heat in the face, and often a strange busyness in the hands. Find your own two or three.
The hands are worth watching, because they tend to say something before you do. Fingers curling, a grip tightening on the steering wheel, a mug held harder than it needs to be. Once you know your own signs you get a warning that arrives ahead of the words, which is the only point at which anything can be done cheaply.
Qur’an and Sunnah
There truly are signs in this for those who can hear (Quran 30:23). Even sleep is offered as something worth attending to, so what your body does as anger rises is worth reading too.
وَمِنۡ ءَايَٰتِهِۦ مَنَامُكُم بِٱلَّيۡلِ وَٱلنَّهَارِ وَٱبۡتِغَآؤُكُم مِّن فَضۡلِهِۦٓۚ إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَأٓيَٰتࣲ لِّقَوۡمࣲ يَسۡمَعُونَ
Among His signs are your sleep, by night and by day, and your seeking His bounty. There truly are signs in this for those who can hear
Qur’an 30:23read 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, a mindfulness based stress reduction programme left people less troubled by difficulty in identifying and describing their feelings, and lowered their reports of hostile and aggressive expression, compared with a waiting list. Waitlist comparisons tend to flatter a treatment, so hold the size of it loosely. The link it points at is the useful part: getting better at reading your own state went along with less of it coming out sideways.
Robins CJ, Keng SL, Ekblad AG, Brantley JG. (2012). Effects of mindfulness-based stress reduction on emotional experience and expression: a randomized controlled trial.. Journal of clinical psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
You can only work with anger you have noticed, and the body notices before you do.
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
Take slow sips of water. You have to hold your breath for a moment to swallow, so your breathing slows down without you having to manage it.
Find something with nothing in it to look at: sky, a blank wall, a ceiling, a stretch of grass. Do not concentrate on it. Let your attention spread out over it.
Trace a slow circle with your finger, on your knee or in the air, once a day. One a day is the whole prescription, which is why it survives contact with real life.