Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
If your whole plan is to keep your mouth shut next time, ask yourself how. Most of us go blank at that question, and the blank is worth more attention than another promise to try harder.
Willpower has been available to you every time this went wrong, so more of it is not the missing piece. What helps is something you can say out loud in advance: the exact sign you will watch for, the words you will use, the room you will walk to. If someone asks how you intend to hold back and you have nothing concrete, that is useful information rather than a verdict on you.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Seek help through steadfastness and prayer, for God is with the steadfast (Quran 2:153). Even patience is described as something you are helped with rather than something you squeeze out of yourself 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
Across four experiments, being provoked left people with less capacity for self control on a later task, and dwelling on the provocation was one route from being wound up to acting on it. An often cited review argued that acts of self control draw down a limited energy supply, though that energy model has since been seriously contested. Taken together they suggest restraint alone is a shaky thing to lean on, which is a weaker claim than any single account of why.
Denson TF, Pedersen WC, Friese M, Hahm A, Roberts L. (2011). Understanding impulsive aggression: Angry rumination and reduced self-control capacity are mechanisms underlying the provocation-aggression relationship.. Personality & social psychology bulletin doi
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
A plan you can describe step by step is something you can practise, while a resolve to try harder is not.
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 will hear that this training gets your thinking brain talking to your alarm brain and widens your margins. That story is reasonable, and it is still a story, so judge the method by what changes in your week.
Your body goes first and you come second. By the time the feeling has a name, the reaction has already been running for a couple of seconds.
Open with the difficulty instead of the accusation. "This is hard for me to say" and "I am worried you will not like this" buy you a hearing that "you always" never will.