Areas › Anger › The moment before you snap
Instead of marking a page, press one fingertip lightly against your knee each time you notice a thought going by. Nobody in the room will see it.
The paper version is fine at home and useless in a meeting or halfway through an argument, which is exactly where you need it. A small press, like pushing a lift button, keeps the same act of noticing and travels everywhere with you. Hands resting on your knees or arms folded, it looks like nothing at all.
Qur’an and Sunnah
If a prompting from Satan should stir you, seek refuge with God (Quran 41:36). The instruction is placed at the moment of stirring, which is where a portable thing beats a better thing you left at home.
وَإِمَّا يَنزَغَنَّكَ مِنَ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنِ نَزۡغࣱ فَٱسۡتَعِذۡ بِٱللَّهِۖ إِنَّهُۥ هُوَ ٱلسَّمِيعُ ٱلۡعَلِيمُ
If a prompting from Satan should stir you, seek refuge with God: He is the All Hearing and the All Knowing
Qur’an 41:36read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a small randomised study of 62 students, people trained to use planned self talk held their attention better after their self control had been run down. A prepared, portable cue can do some work at the moment you are least resourced. It was a laboratory attention task, and no hand gesture of any kind was tested, so this is a nearby finding rather than a direct one.
Gregersen J, Hatzigeorgiadis A, Galanis E, Comoutos N, Papaioannou A. (2017). Countering the Consequences of Ego Depletion: The Effects of Self-Talk on Selective Attention.. Journal of sport & exercise psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A skill only helps if you can use it in the moment that goes wrong, which means being able to do it unseen.
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
Your body knows before you have words for it. A tightening jaw or a hot face is the first news, and it arrives well before any thought about what they meant by that.
You will hear tidy explanations of what your brain does when you get angry. Take the useful part and hold the neat story loosely.
Talking yourself out of anger while it is peaking rarely works. Noticing that a thought is happening costs far less than winning an argument with it.