Areas › Anger › The moment before you snap
Learn a new practice in that order: the picture of what it is, then the plain steps, then actually doing it. Knowing what is coming settles most of the resistance before it starts.
Say to yourself, or to the person you are teaching, that in a minute the talking stops and the doing begins. It sounds trivial and it removes the low hum of what is he going to make me do that keeps a wary person half out of the room. Build it in pieces, like anything else you have learned with your hands.
Qur’an and Sunnah
When you recite the Quran, seek God's protection from the outcast, Satan (Quran 16:98). The protection is asked for at the start of the task, before anything has gone wrong, which is the same instinct as setting up properly before you begin.
فَإِذَا قَرَأۡتَ ٱلۡقُرۡءَانَ فَٱسۡتَعِذۡ بِٱللَّهِ مِنَ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنِ ٱلرَّجِيمِ
[Prophet], when you recite the Quran, seek God’s protection from the outcast, Satan
Qur’an 16:98read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a randomised controlled trial, a twelve week kindness and mindfulness curriculum improved preschool children's self regulation and sharing compared with a control group, which is evidence that this kind of skill responds to being taught in a structured way over time. The teaching had a sequence and a schedule rather than being a single explanation. It was a study in young children, so it tells you the format is teachable and not how it will feel to you.
Flook L, Goldberg SB, Pinger L, Davidson RJ. (2015). Promoting prosocial behavior and self-regulatory skills in preschool children through a mindfulness-based Kindness Curriculum.. Developmental psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A person who knows the shape of what is coming has attention free for the thing itself.
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
Some signals cannot be acted on. Ringing in the ears, an old ache, a resentment about something long finished: the alarm is real and there is nothing to answer it with.
What you are doing when you sit on the bank has a name. Researchers call it metacognitive distancing, and it has been studied for decades.
The river is different every minute. The one sitting on the bank is the same one who sat there ten years ago, and will be there in ten more.