Areas › Anger › The moment before you snap
Run it for about ninety seconds, stop, and see how that was. Short and repeated beats one long sit, especially if sitting still is not your strong point.
A minute and a half is short enough that a restless or reluctant person will agree to it, and long enough for something to happen worth talking about. Do it, talk about it, then do it again with a small change. The other advantage is obvious once you are at home: ninety seconds is a length of time you might actually find on a Tuesday.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Man was created hasty: I will show you My signs soon, so do not ask Me to hasten them (Quran 21:37). Something is given in its own time here, which is a gentle argument against demanding the whole result from one sitting.
خُلِقَ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنُ مِنۡ عَجَلࣲۚ سَأُوْرِيكُمۡ ءَايَٰتِي فَلَا تَسۡتَعۡجِلُونِ
Man was created hasty: I will show you My signs soon, so do not ask Me to hasten them
Qur’an 21:37read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a randomised experiment, repeated practice on small self control tasks improved how people performed on later self control tasks, which suggests the capacity responds to short repeated work. The study was small and short term, so it is a reasonable basis for trying little and often rather than a firm dose. Nothing in it fixes ninety seconds as the right number.
Cranwell J, Benford S, Houghton RJ, Golembewski M, Fischer JE, Hagger MS. (2014). Increasing self-regulatory energy using an Internet-based training application delivered by smartphone technology.. Cyberpsychology, behavior and social networking doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Short goes, done often, teach the move better than one long effort you dread repeating.
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
Awareness runs a step behind the feeling. The work is not to stop anger arriving, it is to widen the gap between noticing it and acting on it.
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.
If waiting has always been hard for you, and your attention has always been restless, that belongs in the anger picture rather than in a separate story.