Areas › Anger › Making it stick
Pick the news channel you cannot stand and watch ten minutes of it on purpose. The only job is to notice what rises in you and let it go by.
Real provocation turns up when you are least ready for it. This gives you the feeling with nothing at stake: the indignation, the tightening, the urge to argue with a screen. Watch it come and watch it go, then stop while it is still comfortably manageable.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Only those who are steadfast in patience, only those who are blessed with great righteousness, will attain to such goodness (Quran 41:35). The verse is about answering a bad turn with a better one, which is the capacity this rehearsal is building.
وَمَا يُلَقَّىٰهَآ إِلَّا ٱلَّذِينَ صَبَرُواْ وَمَا يُلَقَّىٰهَآ إِلَّا ذُو حَظٍّ عَظِيمࣲ
but only those who are steadfast in patience, only those who are blessed with great righteousness, will attain to such goodness
Qur’an 41:35read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A randomised trial with young people who had high levels of worry and rumination found that a six week group training reduced the later onset of anxiety and depression. That supports building a skill before the crisis rather than during it. It was a prevention trial in young people, not a study of deliberately winding yourself up, so the parallel is with the timing rather than the method.
Topper M, Emmelkamp PM, Watkins E, Ehring T. (2017). Prevention of anxiety disorders and depression by targeting excessive worry and rumination in adolescents and young adults: A randomized controlled trial.. Behaviour research and therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Practising the response while genuinely stirred is what makes it available when it is a person and not a screen.
When not to
Choose material that irritates rather than material that frightens, and leave it alone if it touches something you have actually lived through.
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 something is genuinely alive for the person in front of you, work with that. Whatever you had planned to cover keeps until a quieter week.
There is an old story about two wolves fighting inside a person, and the winner turns out to be whichever one gets fed. It is only a story, but the arithmetic in it is right.
If a practice looks pointless, you will have dropped it by Thursday. Before you take on anything new, get clear on what it is meant to be building in you.