Areas › Anger › The moment before you snap
Some signals cannot be acted on. Ringing in the ears, an old ache, a resentment about something long finished: the alarm is real and there is nothing to answer it with.
Fighting a signal you cannot switch off lays a second misery on top of the first. People who live well with long term pain tend to do something else with it. They let it be there, at a slight distance, without handing it the whole day. The same handling suits an anger with nowhere to go, about a person who is gone or a thing that cannot be undone.
Qur’an and Sunnah
I will show you My signs soon, so do not ask Me to hasten them (Quran 21:37). Not everything pressing on you can be settled now, and demanding that it be settled now is its own kind of suffering.
خُلِقَ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنُ مِنۡ عَجَلࣲۚ سَأُوْرِيكُمۡ ءَايَٰتِي فَلَا تَسۡتَعۡجِلُونِ
Man was created hasty: I will show you My signs soon, so do not ask Me to hasten them
Qur’an 21:37read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review across anxiety, depression, substance problems, eating disorders and borderline personality disorder found that improvements in how people handled emotion went along with improvements in symptoms in every one of those groups. So this way of holding a signal is not anger specific. A review of this kind shows things moving together and cannot say which one moved first.
Sloan E, Hall K, Moulding R, Bryce S, Mildred H, Staiger PK. (2017). Emotion regulation as a transdiagnostic treatment construct across anxiety, depression, substance, eating and borderline personality disorders: A systematic review.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Struggling with something that will not move costs you a great deal and changes nothing about the signal.
When not to
A new or changing pain, or ringing in the ears that has just started, is worth getting checked medically before you set about accepting it.
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
If steady sounds like soft to you, notice who actually holds a room. It is not the one who goes off first.
That small press of your own finger does two jobs. It marks the thought, and it gives you a bit of contact with yourself while everything around you is loud.
You did not calm yourself down. You sat still and watched, and calm turned up. It is worth having that the right way round.