Areas › Anger › The moment before you snap
If you want to start noticing what goes on inside you, start with the urges. The pull to speak, to stand up, to say the cutting thing: those have a push behind them that thoughts and moods do not.
Thoughts slide past before you can get hold of them, feelings blur into each other, and body sensations are vague. An urge announces itself, because part of you has already begun getting ready to move. That turns out to be lucky, since in anger the urge is the thing that gets you into trouble, so the easiest thing to catch is also the one worth catching.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Lord, I take refuge with You from the goadings of the evil ones (Quran 23:97). Goading is the right word for it, and a push can be felt before it is obeyed.
وَقُل رَّبِّ أَعُوذُ بِكَ مِنۡ هَمَزَٰتِ ٱلشَّيَٰطِينِ
and say, ‘Lord, I take refuge with You from the goadings of the evil ones
Qur’an 23:97read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A brain stimulation experiment found that disrupting a region involved in holding back impulses made people both more impulsive on a simple motor task and more likely to retaliate after being provoked. The urge to move and the urge to hit back appear to run through some of the same machinery, which is a reason to keep an eye on urges in particular. It was a small laboratory study of one brain region, so read it as a clue about the wiring rather than a description of your evening.
Dambacher F, Sack AT, Lobbestael J, Arntz A, Brugman S, Schuhmann T. (2015). Out of control: evidence for anterior insula involvement in motor impulsivity and reactive aggression.. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
An urge is your body preparing to act, and that preparation is something you can actually feel.
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
When someone's tone lands as an attack, part of that reading was made years ago. Your alarm hands you stored learning dressed up as a plain fact about right now.
You can be in full control of what you do and still be burning inside. Calm is not the entry requirement.
The alarm stores as well as reacts. Every flare that ends badly teaches it a little, and so does every one you handle gently.