Areas › Anger › Anger, alcohol and the body
If drinking is anywhere in the picture, stopping will probably do more for your anger than any technique you could learn. That is not the interesting answer, it is just the one that moves the most.
Skills work at the edges of a hard moment. Alcohol removes the very part of you those skills run on, so you can practise beautifully on a Tuesday afternoon and have none of it available on Friday night. People with a short fuse also tend to reach for a drink when they are already angry, which stacks the two things at exactly the wrong time. Better to face this early than after a year of trying everything else first.
Qur’an and Sunnah
With intoxicants and gambling, Satan seeks only to incite enmity and hatred among you, and to stop you remembering God and prayer (Quran 5:91). Bad feeling between people is named as the point of the thing rather than an unlucky side effect of it.
إِنَّمَا يُرِيدُ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنُ أَن يُوقِعَ بَيۡنَكُمُ ٱلۡعَدَٰوَةَ وَٱلۡبَغۡضَآءَ فِي ٱلۡخَمۡرِ وَٱلۡمَيۡسِرِ وَيَصُدَّكُمۡ عَن ذِكۡرِ ٱللَّهِ وَعَنِ ٱلصَّلَوٰةِۖ فَهَلۡ أَنتُم مُّنتَهُونَ
With intoxicants and gambling, Satan seeks only to incite enmity and hatred among you, and to stop you remembering God and prayer. Will you not give them up
Qur’an 5:91read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a randomised clinical trial, adding a 90 minute motivational alcohol intervention to a standard programme for people who had been violent towards a partner reduced both substance use and violence, compared with the programme alone. Separately, among men arrested for domestic violence, alcohol problems, antisocial traits and low distress tolerance each predicted partner violence, though that was cross-sectional data and cannot show which way the arrow points. Together they make a modest case rather than a proof, and the case is simply that the drinking belongs in the plan.
Stuart GL, Shorey RC, Moore TM, Ramsey SE, Kahler CW, O'Farrell TJ, Strong DR, Temple JR, Monti PM. (2013). Randomized clinical trial examining the incremental efficacy of a 90-minute motivational alcohol intervention as an adjunct to standard batterer intervention for men.. Addiction (Abingdon, England) doi
Brem MJ, Florimbio AR, Elmquist J, Shorey RC, Stuart GL. (2018). Antisocial Traits, Distress Tolerance, and Alcohol Problems as Predictors of Intimate Partner Violence in Men Arrested for Domestic Violence.. Psychology of violence doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Nothing you have learned is available if the part of you that applies it has been switched off.
When not to
If you drink heavily every day, stopping suddenly and alone can be dangerous, so ask a doctor how to do it safely.
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
Sleep, food, illness and the run of stress you have been carrying set the height of your fuse before anything has even happened. Sort those out and you are simply a calmer person that week, with no insight required.
Alcohol does not add anger. It takes off the brake. Stimulants do the opposite job and press harder on the accelerator, and having both in you at once is the worst arrangement of the two.
Anger sends people back to the thing they had stopped, and the thing they had stopped makes the anger worse. Any plan that treats these as two separate projects tends to come apart.