Areas › Anger › Cool the body first
Trace a slow circle with your finger, on your knee or in the air, once a day. One a day is the whole prescription, which is why it survives contact with real life.
A small movement done daily becomes a handle. After a few weeks the gesture starts to bring a little of the settled state with it, and you can use it in a meeting or across a dinner table without anybody noticing. Fix it to something: after Fajr, on the bus. Otherwise it drifts.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Believers, remember God often (Quran 33:41). Often is the instruction rather than long, which is exactly how a small daily practice gets built.
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ ٱذۡكُرُواْ ٱللَّهَ ذِكۡرࣰ ا كَثِيرࣰ ا
Believers, remember God often
Qur’an 33:41read 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 tai chi found it was associated with less stress, anxiety and depression and with better mood, while noting that most of the trials included were of low methodological quality. Slow deliberate movement does seem to help, and the evidence for it is thinner than the enthusiasm around it. A daily small gesture is a modest version of the same idea and deserves modest expectations.
Wang C, Bannuru R, Ramel J, Kupelnick B, Scott T, Schmid CH. (2010). Tai Chi on psychological well-being: systematic review and meta-analysis.. BMC complementary and alternative medicine doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A gesture repeated while you are calm begins to carry some of that calm with 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
Slowing the breath seems to widen the gap in which you can still see your options. It does not make the anger go away, it gives you a moment inside it.
Clench your fist a few times, then open it a different way each time: fingers first, thumb last, slowly, all at once. The second half is the harder half, and it is the whole exercise.
If open awareness sounds like too much, put it plainly: look at the background instead of the thing in front of it. That is the entire instruction.