Areas › Anger › Making it stick
Nobody sees the times you did not say the cutting thing, including you a week later. Put them somewhere you can look at: one sticky note on the wall for each.
Memory is unfair about this. The single evening you lost your temper stays vivid while thirty quiet successes disappear, and then it feels as though nothing is working. A wall that slowly fills up is an argument you can look at on a bad day.
Qur’an and Sunnah
That his labour will be seen (Quran 53:40). What you do alone, with no witness and no credit, is not lost.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A randomised controlled trial found that a simple mobile based intervention raised self-esteem in students with depressive symptoms, which is some evidence that light, low intensity tools can carry a practice along. The sample was students with depressive symptoms rather than people working on anger, and the tool was digital rather than notes on a wall. The transferable part is how little the format has to cost, not the size of the effect.
Bruhns A, Lüdtke T, Moritz S, Bücker L. (2021). A Mobile-Based Intervention to Increase Self-esteem in Students With Depressive Symptoms: Randomized Controlled Trial.. JMIR mHealth and uHealth doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Successes you can see stacked up are harder to argue away than ones you have to remember.
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
A new practice needs somewhere to live. Hook it to something you already do a few times a day, like sitting down to eat.
The aim is not to stop feeling angry. It is to stretch the time between the feeling arriving and you doing anything about it, from no seconds to a few.
Your brain is expensive to run and it spends where it is used. What you stop practising gets quietly defunded.