Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
Now draw a fourth circle and choose everything about it: how big, where on the page, which way round, where you start. Notice how much heavier that feels.
The weight is the point. Deliberate control has a texture to it, and most people can feel the difference between the first three circles and the fourth within a second. Learning what that texture feels like on paper gives you something to recognise later, when what is at stake is a conversation rather than a scrap of paper.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Believers, be mindful of God, speak in a direct fashion and to good purpose (Quran 33:70). Speech that is direct and aimed at something is chosen speech, and choosing costs a little more than simply letting words out.
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ ٱتَّقُواْ ٱللَّهَ وَقُولُواْ قَوۡلࣰ ا سَدِيدࣰ ا
Believers, be mindful of God, speak in a direct fashion and to good purpose
Qur’an 33:70read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a meta-analysis of brain imaging studies, people with mood and anxiety disorders who deliberately reinterpreted a situation used the same frontal and amygdala system as everyone else but with altered activation, suggesting the capacity is present and runs less efficiently. If deliberate control feels like heavy work to you, that is a recognisable finding rather than a personal failing. Averages from scanners say little about a given person on a given day.
Picó-Pérez M, Radua J, Steward T, Menchón JM, Soriano-Mas C. (2017). Emotion regulation in mood and anxiety disorders: A meta-analysis of fMRI cognitive reappraisal studies.. Progress in neuro-psychopharmacology & biological psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Choosing on purpose feels different from doing on automatic, and the difference is learnable.
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
Your body goes first and you come second. By the time the feeling has a name, the reaction has already been running for a couple of seconds.
The circle was never the point. Any break in a running routine will do, because the break itself is what puts you back in the driving seat for a moment.
You are not stuck with the temper you have had so far. Reactions are learnt, which is unglamorous news and also the hopeful kind.