Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
The version of you making sensible plans this afternoon is not the version standing in the kitchen at eleven at night. Plan for the other one.
That means leaving things in place instead of relying on your future good sense: the phone charging in the hall, an agreement that either of you can call a stop, no hard conversations after ten. Treat late you as someone who deserves easier conditions rather than someone who ought to try harder.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Seek help through steadfastness and prayer, for God is with the steadfast (Quran 2:153). Help is something you draw on, which assumes you were never meant to manage on willpower alone.
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ ٱسۡتَعِينُواْ بِٱلصَّبۡرِ وَٱلصَّلَوٰةِۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ مَعَ ٱلصَّٰبِرِينَ
You who believe, seek help through steadfastness and prayer, for God is with the steadfast
Qur’an 2:153read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
An influential review argued that acts of self-control draw down blood glucose and that failures become likelier when it runs low. The energy model behind that has since been contested, so the specific mechanism is doubtful. The plainer point survives: your control varies with your state, and planning around that is safer than assuming it will hold.
Gailliot MT, Baumeister RF. (2007). The physiology of willpower: linking blood glucose to self-control.. Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Self control is weaker when you are tired or stretched, so arrangements hold better than intentions.
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
Not taking things personally is a question rather than a personality. The question is short: was that aimed at me, or was I simply standing there?
Aim for the cat rather than the dog. The dog goes off the second the door knocks, while the cat waits, watches, and still moves decisively when it decides to move.
Offer a practice as a question rather than an instruction. What do you think it would be like to wake yourself up once a day? That is a very different sentence from you should.