Areas › Anger › Making it stick
Your brain is expensive to run and it spends where it is used. What you stop practising gets quietly defunded.
This is the honest reason to keep a skill going after it has started working. The month you feel calm is exactly the month the practice looks unnecessary, and that is when most people let it slide. Keep a smaller version rather than none.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Those who recite God's scripture, keep up the prayer, give secretly and openly from what We have provided for them, may hope for a trade that will never decline (Quran 35:29). Steady small investment is the picture, not one dramatic push.
إِنَّ ٱلَّذِينَ يَتۡلُونَ كِتَٰبَ ٱللَّهِ وَأَقَامُواْ ٱلصَّلَوٰةَ وَأَنفَقُواْ مِمَّا رَزَقۡنَٰهُمۡ سِرࣰّ ا وَعَلَانِيَةࣰ يَرۡجُونَ تِجَٰرَةࣰ لَّن تَبُورَ
Those who recite God’s scripture, keep up the prayer, give secretly and openly from what We have provided for them, may hope for a trade that will never decline
Qur’an 35:29read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Reviews of longer term treatment for depression point the same way: continuing for something like nine months to a year after a person is well is supported, and gains erode when treatment stops too early. That is a narrative review of depression treatment, not a study of anger practice, and it is about staying in treatment rather than about brain metabolism. The useful part is the timing, since stopping at the first sign of being better is the risky moment.
Eugene S. Paykel (2001). Continuation and maintenance therapy in depression. British Medical Bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
What you keep using stays available, and what you drop fades back.
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
You do not have to believe the calmer sentence yet. Say it anyway, on purpose, often, and belief tends to arrive behind the repetition rather than in front of it.
Treat it like brushing your teeth rather than like meditating. Nobody is good at brushing their teeth, and nobody skips it because last night's went badly.
Nobody sees the times you did not say the cutting thing, including you a week later. Put them somewhere you can look at: one sticky note on the wall for each.