Areas › Anger › Cool the body first
Anger numbs. If it is doing the work of a painkiller for you, it will be hard to put down while the pain underneath is still untreated.
Ask what tends to be there in the half hour before you flare: a bit of shame, feeling small, an old fear about being left. The anger often arrives to stop you feeling that. Tending to the ache underneath does more for a temper than any amount of discipline aimed at the temper itself.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Did We not relieve your heart for you (Quran 94:1). The pressure in the chest is spoken to directly, which is a gentler place to start from than blaming yourself for the temper.
أَلَمۡ نَشۡرَحۡ لَكَ صَدۡرَكَ
Did We not relieve your heart for you [Prophet]
Qur’an 94:1read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a small controlled study of people with depersonalisation, physiological arousal was blunted, and deliberately raising it with biofeedback reduced the feelings of numbness and disembodiment. That is a different condition, a small sample, and not a study of anger at all. It is here only as a reminder that numbing is a physiological event rather than a character flaw.
Schoenberg PL, Sierra M, David AS. (2012). Psychophysiological investigations in depersonalization disorder and effects of electrodermal biofeedback.. Journal of trauma & dissociation : the official journal of the International Society for the Study of Dissociation (ISSD) doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Nothing gets given up while it is still the only thing making the pain bearable.
When not to
If what sits under the anger is trauma or a loss you have never been able to look at, that is work to do with someone alongside you.
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
If breathing exercises have felt insulting to you in the past, it may be that they arrived too early. They tend to land once you can already feel the anger coming.
Anger pulls your attention towards whatever provoked it, the way a vacuum cleaner pulls at a curtain. Naming it that way makes it something happening to you rather than something wrong with you.
Clench your fist a few times, then open it a different way each time: fingers first, thumb last, slowly, all at once. The second half is the harder half, and it is the whole exercise.