Areas › Anger › The moment before you snap
Try sorting whatever passes through your mind into three: good for me, bad for me, or neither. That third option is real, and most of us forget it is there.
Your mind tags things before you have had any say in it, and anger tends to follow the tag rather than the event itself. Sitting for a few minutes and marking each passing thought as a plus, a minus or just a dot slows the tagging down enough that you can watch it happen. Do it often enough and the dot starts to feel available in the middle of an ordinary day.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Believers, if you remain mindful of God, He will give you a criterion [to tell right from wrong] (Quran 8:29). The aim is not to stop judging, it is to judge by something steadier than the first flash of good for me or bad for me.
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوٓاْ إِن تَتَّقُواْ ٱللَّهَ يَجۡعَل لَّكُمۡ فُرۡقَانࣰ ا وَيُكَفِّرۡ عَنكُمۡ سَيِّـَٔاتِكُمۡ وَيَغۡفِرۡ لَكُمۡۗ وَٱللَّهُ ذُو ٱلۡفَضۡلِ ٱلۡعَظِيمِ
Believers, if you remain mindful of God, He will give you a criterion [to tell right from wrong] and wipe out your bad deeds, and forgive you: God’s favour is great indeed
Qur’an 8:29read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Pooling brain imaging studies, reinterpreting an upsetting situation reliably drew on frontal control regions and lowered activity in the amygdala, the brain's threat detector. How you read an event does change how hard it lands. Withholding the reading altogether goes a step further than reinterpreting it, and that step has not been tested in the same way.
Buhle JT, Silvers JA, Wager TD, Lopez R, Onyemekwu C, Kober H, Weber J, Ochsner KN. (2014). Cognitive reappraisal of emotion: a meta-analysis of human neuroimaging studies.. Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Anger comes after the judgement, so noticing the judgement gives you an earlier place to step in.
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
Most of us rehearse the crushing line we wish we had said. Try spending that same time writing what you would actually like to say next time, and keep it short enough to remember.
The alarm sits early in the chain, which is why it beats you to a conclusion. Speed is what it is for, and accuracy is not.
It helps to get one real taste of this early, in a single sitting, rather than waiting weeks to find out whether any of it is for you.