Areas › Anger › The moment before you snap
There is no accuracy to aim for here and nothing to beat. Every dot means you got back to the bank, and that is the entire scoring system.
People who are hard on themselves will turn anything into a test, and a test is the one thing that will wreck this. You are not aiming for a tidy page or an impressive count. If you catch yourself grading the session, that thought gets a dot too. A practice you can do badly is a practice you will keep.
Qur’an and Sunnah
God promises you His forgiveness and His abundance (Quran 2:268). That promise is set against the voice that only ever threatens, which is worth remembering when the harshest scorer in the room is you.
ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنُ يَعِدُكُمُ ٱلۡفَقۡرَ وَيَأۡمُرُكُم بِٱلۡفَحۡشَآءِۖ وَٱللَّهُ يَعِدُكُم مَّغۡفِرَةࣰ مِّنۡهُ وَفَضۡلࣰ اۗ وَٱللَّهُ وَٰسِعٌ عَلِيمࣱ
Satan threatens you with the prospect of poverty and commands you to do foul deeds; God promises you His forgiveness and His abundance: God is limitless and all knowing
Qur’an 2:268read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A re analysis of the willpower research found the evidence that glucose explains self control failure to be statistically weak, a useful caution against thinking of willpower as a fuel gauge you can score. If the simple fuel account does not hold, then treating each attempt as a reading of your strength is not measuring much. That re analysis is a critique of one body of work rather than a positive finding about how to practise.
Vadillo MA, Gold N, Osman M. (2016). The Bitter Truth About Sugar and Willpower: The Limited Evidential Value of the Glucose Model of Ego Depletion.. Psychological science doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Take away the standard and there is nothing left to attack yourself with, so the practice survives.
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
The alarm stores as well as reacts. Every flare that ends badly teaches it a little, and so does every one you handle gently.
The black and white thinking that shows up in anger is not proof that something in you is broken. It is what a threat detector does, and threat detectors are built to be crude.
There is a kind of mindfulness that means sinking right into a moment, and another that means stepping back from it. When you are angry, you want the second one.