Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
Thinking about your own thinking sounds abstract until you try it. It is the difference between being angry and noticing that you are angry.
One is a lens you look through, the other is an object you look at, and a thought you can look at has already loosened its hold. Put a small label in front of it: there is the thought that he did that on purpose. Nothing further is needed. The naming is the whole move.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Be tolerant and command what is right: pay no attention to foolish people (Quran 7:199). Attention is treated as something you place rather than something taken from you, and it is the same faculty you use to watch your own thinking.
خُذِ ٱلۡعَفۡوَ وَأۡمُرۡ بِٱلۡعُرۡفِ وَأَعۡرِضۡ عَنِ ٱلۡجَٰهِلِينَ
Be tolerant and command what is right: pay no attention to foolish people
Qur’an 7:199read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Across two samples, people higher in trait mindfulness reported lower anger, hostility and aggression, with less dwelling on anger partly accounting for the link. Standing back from your own thinking goes along with less of the trouble. The design was cross-sectional, so which way the influence runs is not established.
Borders A, Earleywine M, Jajodia A. (2010). Could mindfulness decrease anger, hostility, and aggression by decreasing rumination?. Aggressive behavior doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Once a thought is something you are watching, it stops being the only available view.
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
Catch the reflex on something small. A one-word reply to your message, and the first question your mind asks is what have I done.
Set the terms of a break while nobody is angry: what you will say, how long you will take, where you will go, and that you will not drive. Then it is a shared arrangement rather than something you do to the other person.
Picture a line of dominoes with a gap where one should be. That gap is what a single pause does: it stops a whole run of things, not only the next sentence out of your mouth.