Areas › Anger › What anger actually is
Some anger is disappointed idealism. You expected better of people, or of the world, and the gap between how things should be and how they are comes out as indignation.
You can spot it by the moralising. The sentences are about what people ought to do rather than about what you needed from them. Breathing exercises will not touch this one, because the heat was never the problem. What has to move is the standard, along with the quiet belief that the world is supposed to be fair.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Had you been harsh, or hard-hearted, they would have dispersed and left you (Quran 3:159). Holding people to a hard standard is described in terms of what it costs you in company, not in terms of who was right.
فَبِمَا رَحۡمَةࣲ مِّنَ ٱللَّهِ لِنتَ لَهُمۡۖ وَلَوۡ كُنتَ فَظًّا غَلِيظَ ٱلۡقَلۡبِ لَٱنفَضُّواْ مِنۡ حَوۡلِكَۖ فَٱعۡفُ عَنۡهُمۡ وَٱسۡتَغۡفِرۡ لَهُمۡ وَشَاوِرۡهُمۡ فِي ٱلۡأَمۡرِۖ فَإِذَا عَزَمۡتَ فَتَوَكَّلۡ عَلَى ٱللَّهِۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ يُحِبُّ ٱلۡمُتَوَكِّلِينَ
By an act of mercy from God, you [Prophet] were gentle in your dealings with them- had you been harsh, or hard-hearted, they would have dispersed and left you- so pardon them and ask forgiveness for them. Consult with them about matters, then, when you have decided on a course of action, put your trust in God: God loves those who put their trust in Him
Qur’an 3:159read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a survey of 335 hospital nurses, rigid beliefs about how other people ought to behave, alongside a habit of dwelling on slights, predicted whether anger was bottled up or expressed destructively. That points at the beliefs rather than the arousal as the thing worth working on. It is one cross-sectional sample from one profession, so the beliefs and the anger were measured together rather than one shown to cause the other.
Ham EM, You MJ. (2018). Role of Irrational Beliefs and Anger Rumination on Nurses' Anger Expression Styles.. Workplace health & safety doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
The anger is coming out of the expectation, so it keeps returning until the expectation gets looked at.
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
Humans have a long history of harming each other, and pretending otherwise keeps nobody safe. Assume the capacity is there and plan around it.
The hardest anger to put down is the kind that feels morally correct. It arrives with a rush of certainty and the sense of being on the right side, and that combination is very hard to argue with.
Some anger fires when your image takes a knock: your child playing up in a shop, your name left off something, a correction in front of other people. What got punctured was the picture of yourself.