Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
Anger shown early sometimes stops things going further. A clear no at the start can prevent the whole conversation that would have ended much worse.
Plenty of people learned this the hard way and they are not wrong: visible anger draws a line, and lines get respected. What is worth adding is the running cost. A line held with heat works in the moment and tends to be expensive to keep paying for over years.
Qur’an and Sunnah
There is no cause to act against anyone who defends himself after being wronged (Quran 42:41). Self defence is not the thing being corrected, though the verse does mark where defence stops.
وَلَمَنِ ٱنتَصَرَ بَعۡدَ ظُلۡمِهِۦ فَأُوْلَٰٓئِكَ مَا عَلَيۡهِم مِّن سَبِيلٍ
There is no cause to act against anyone who defends himself after being wronged
Qur’an 42:41read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a substudy of a cardiac trial, hostility and anger predicted poorer health related quality of life, and part of that link was explained by a weaker sense that life felt understandable and manageable. The design was cross-sectional, so it cannot say which came first. It does mean the running cost of a permanently angry stance is not imaginary.
Julkunen J, Ahlström R. (2006). Hostility, anger, and sense of coherence as predictors of health-related quality of life. Results of an ASCOT substudy.. Journal of psychosomatic research doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A credible warning can end a contest before it starts, though living at that level of readiness slowly wears you down.
When not to
If anger is what is keeping you safe from someone right now, safety comes first and this is not the thing to be working on yet.
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
Part of what makes anger attractive is how simple it makes everything. Working out who was right and what to do next is slow and uncertain, and anger hands you an answer straight away.
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.
You are built to react before you have thought about it. That is why the intention you held this morning loses so easily to the moment itself.