Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
The urge arriving and you acting on it are two separate events. Years of history may have welded them together, and they still come apart with practice.
Name them separately while they are happening: here is the surge, and here is me, still deciding. Some people keep their hands busy or their mouth shut for one breath purely to make the join visible. Every time the two stay apart, the weld gets a little weaker.
Qur’an and Sunnah
If a prompting from Satan should stir you, seek refuge with God: He is the All Hearing and the All Knowing (Quran 41:36). The stirring is one thing and your answer to it is another, and only the second is asked of you.
وَإِمَّا يَنزَغَنَّكَ مِنَ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنِ نَزۡغࣱ فَٱسۡتَعِذۡ بِٱللَّهِۖ إِنَّهُۥ هُوَ ٱلسَّمِيعُ ٱلۡعَلِيمُ
If a prompting from Satan should stir you, seek refuge with God: He is the All Hearing and the All Knowing
Qur’an 41:36read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a multilevel study, both people's general mindfulness and their moment to moment fluctuations in it predicted lower aggressiveness, with less brooding on the anger as the path between. It was observational, so it shows the pattern holding within people over time rather than proving that training attention lowers aggression.
Eisenlohr-Moul TA, Peters JR, Pond RS, DeWall CN. (2016). Both trait and state mindfulness predict lower aggressiveness via anger rumination: A multilevel mediation analysis.. Mindfulness doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Once you can see the urge as its own thing, acting on it becomes a choice rather than a continuation.
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
Your mind sorts fast and rough. It matches what is happening now against something it has met before, and in a bad moment it rounds a raised eyebrow up to contempt.
One walker keeps a small pebble in his sock on walks he would otherwise take in a daze. Every few steps it says the same thing: you are here, this is now.
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.