Areas › Anger › The moment before you snap
You did not calm yourself down. You sat still and watched, and calm turned up. It is worth having that the right way round.
If you credit your own effort for the calm, you will reach for that effort next time you are furious, and it will not be there. Then the failure feels personal, on top of the anger. What you are practising is the stopping and the watching. The settling is a by product and it arrives on its own schedule.
Qur’an and Sunnah
When Moses' anger abated, he picked up the Tablets (Quran 7:154). The anger subsided and then he acted, in that order.
وَلَمَّا سَكَتَ عَن مُّوسَى ٱلۡغَضَبُ أَخَذَ ٱلۡأَلۡوَاحَۖ وَفِي نُسۡخَتِهَا هُدࣰ ى وَرَحۡمَةࣱ لِّلَّذِينَ هُمۡ لِرَبِّهِمۡ يَرۡهَبُونَ
When Moses’ anger abated, he picked up the Tablets, on which were inscribed guidance and mercy for those who stood in awe of their Lord
Qur’an 7:154read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis pooling 83 studies found that effortful self control on one task left people worse at controlling themselves on the next, although later work has questioned how large and how reliable that effect really is. Either way, forcing calm out of yourself looks like an expensive way to get it. The size of the effect is genuinely unsettled, so hold the willpower as fuel picture lightly.
Hagger MS, Wood C, Stiff C, Chatzisarantis NL. (2010). Ego depletion and the strength model of self-control: a meta-analysis.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Trying hard to feel calm is another way of wrestling with the feeling, which keeps it going.
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
The alarm stores as well as reacts. Every flare that ends badly teaches it a little, and so does every one you handle gently.
If the thought arrives that this is going too fast and you cannot keep up, that thought gets a dot like everything else. There is no version of this you can fail.
The threat system fires in under a second, and conscious oversight needs two or three. A time-out is not a clever technique, it is just a way of surviving that gap.