Areas › Anger › The moment before you snap
Got drowsy doing it? Nothing has gone wrong. Your body has decided there is no threat here, which was rather the point.
People apologise for getting sleepy, as though they failed to concentrate hard enough. The heaviness is your alarm system standing down, and it is a signal you can feel for yourself without anybody interpreting it for you. If it happens every time and you would rather stay alert, sit upright with your eyes open in a cooler room.
Qur’an and Sunnah
If Satan should prompt you to do something, seek refuge with God (Quran 7:200). Refuge is somewhere the guard is allowed to come down, and the body tends to notice when it has arrived.
وَإِمَّا يَنزَغَنَّكَ مِنَ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنِ نَزۡغࣱ فَٱسۡتَعِذۡ بِٱللَّهِۚ إِنَّهُۥ سَمِيعٌ عَلِيمٌ
If Satan should prompt you to do something, seek refuge with God- He is all hearing, all knowing
Qur’an 7:200read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Randomised studies of slow paced breathing training found moderate improvements in anxiety, low mood and performance, which shows that a shift in the body's state is a real and trainable thing rather than a figure of speech. Those trials measured symptoms over weeks. Whether one drowsy session tells you anything on its own was not what they looked at.
Lehrer P, Kaur K, Sharma A, Shah K, Huseby R, Bhavsar J, Sgobba P, Zhang Y. (2020). Heart Rate Variability Biofeedback Improves Emotional and Physical Health and Performance: A Systematic Review and Meta Analysis.. Applied psychophysiology and biofeedback doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
You cannot be settling and braced for danger at the same time, so the heaviness is evidence of the settling.
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
Anger often grows after the moment that started it, with nothing new added. The system amplifies its own signal, insisting that this is big, pay attention, react.
If watching your mind feels too open, rest your attention on your breathing instead. Do not deepen it or slow it down. Just feel the breath you are already taking.
Do not write down what the thought was. No words, no summaries, just the mark. This is not journaling and nobody is going to ask you what came up.