Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
Change seems to need three things at once: a reason, a method, and enough freedom in the moment to use the method. When you stall, work out which one is missing before trying harder at all of them.
A reason on its own leaves you with a wish. A method on its own leaves you with something you never reach for. Freedom is the one that gets skipped, and it means being awake enough at the time to do what you already know. Whoever is helping you can aim at a different one of the three depending on your answer, which beats repeating the same advice louder.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Be tolerant and command what is right: pay no attention to foolish people (Quran 7:199). Three separate instructions sit in one line, and dropping any of them leaves you with something that does not hold up.
خُذِ ٱلۡعَفۡوَ وَأۡمُرۡ بِٱلۡعُرۡفِ وَأَعۡرِضۡ عَنِ ٱلۡجَٰهِلِينَ
Be tolerant and command what is right: pay no attention to foolish people
Qur’an 7:199read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis of 212 studies with more than 80,000 young people found that how someone copes and handles feelings is consistently linked to their symptoms, with effects that are modest in size. Modest is the honest word: these strategies matter and they are one part of a life rather than the whole of it. The work was in children and adolescents, and it is associational.
Compas BE, Jaser SS, Bettis AH, Watson KH, Gruhn MA, Dunbar JP, Williams E, Thigpen JC. (2017). Coping, emotion regulation, and psychopathology in childhood and adolescence: A meta-analysis and narrative review.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Naming the missing piece stops you spending effort on the pieces you already have.
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
Catch the reflex on something small. A one-word reply to your message, and the first question your mind asks is what have I done.
Changing how you react is two jobs, not one: loosening the old response and building the new one. Most people only do the second and then wonder why the old one keeps winning.
There are two ways to widen the gap between being provoked and responding: get better at noticing, and get better at choosing. They are separate skills, and having both means one can cover for the other.