Areas › Anger › Choosing your response
Offer a practice as a question rather than an instruction. What do you think it would be like to wake yourself up once a day? That is a very different sentence from you should.
People argue with instructions, particularly people who were sent rather than came. A question leaves them to make the case, and the case they make is the one they will act on. Ask it of yourself in those words too, and notice that the answer arrives with some curiosity attached rather than a sigh.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Call [people] to the way of your Lord with wisdom and good teaching. Argue with them in the most courteous way (Quran 16:125). Even when the case being made is the truest one, the manner of the invitation is specified.
ٱدۡعُ إِلَىٰ سَبِيلِ رَبِّكَ بِٱلۡحِكۡمَةِ وَٱلۡمَوۡعِظَةِ ٱلۡحَسَنَةِۖ وَجَٰدِلۡهُم بِٱلَّتِي هِيَ أَحۡسَنُۚ إِنَّ رَبَّكَ هُوَ أَعۡلَمُ بِمَن ضَلَّ عَن سَبِيلِهِۦ وَهُوَ أَعۡلَمُ بِٱلۡمُهۡتَدِينَ
[Prophet], call [people] to the way of your Lord with wisdom and good teaching. Argue with them in the most courteous way, for your Lord knows best who has strayed from His way and who is rightly guided
Qur’an 16:125read 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 feeling is consistently linked with their symptoms, with effects that are modest in size. Modest is worth saying out loud when you are suggesting something to another person: this is an experiment worth running, not a cure to hand over. The research 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
An idea you talked yourself into does not need defending against.
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 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.
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.
If you are on autopilot, the part of you that would notice is asleep as well. So do not count on waking yourself in the moment, arrange for something outside you to do the waking.