Areas › Anger › Practising under provocation
Your body treats an insult with the same urgency as a threat to your safety, and the two are not the same at all. Saying that to yourself plainly, while it is happening, takes some of the false emergency out of it.
Have a short line ready and use it while the heat is still rising. Nothing here is actually being taken from me. It will not make the sting vanish and it is not meant to. What it buys is a second in which your judgement can catch up with your pulse, which is usually all that was missing.
Qur’an and Sunnah
You are sure to be tested through your possessions and persons; you are sure to hear much that is hurtful (Quran 3:186). Words that wound are named here as a test to be met, not as damage to be repaired.
۞لَتُبۡلَوُنَّ فِيٓ أَمۡوَٰلِكُمۡ وَأَنفُسِكُمۡ وَلَتَسۡمَعُنَّ مِنَ ٱلَّذِينَ أُوتُواْ ٱلۡكِتَٰبَ مِن قَبۡلِكُمۡ وَمِنَ ٱلَّذِينَ أَشۡرَكُوٓاْ أَذࣰ ى كَثِيرࣰ اۚ وَإِن تَصۡبِرُواْ وَتَتَّقُواْ فَإِنَّ ذَٰلِكَ مِنۡ عَزۡمِ ٱلۡأُمُورِ
you are sure to be tested through your possessions and persons; you are sure to hear much that is hurtful from those who were given the Scripture before you and from those who associate others with God. If you are steadfast and mindful of God, that is the best course
Qur’an 3:186read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a laboratory experiment, people who had just been made angry and were then asked to reappraise the event, or to distract themselves, ended up in a different emotional state from those told to think it over analytically. The instruction they were given changed where they landed. It was one recalled event in a lab, so read it as encouragement to have a line ready rather than a measure of how much that line will help.
Denson TF, Moulds ML, Grisham JR. (2012). The effects of analytical rumination, reappraisal, and distraction on anger experience.. Behavior therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Naming a threat for what it really is lowers how urgently your body insists you act.
When not to
If what you are facing is not a slight but ongoing abuse or a real threat, this does not apply and your safety comes first.
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
Go to the gym without the getting ready. No mirror check, no fixing your hair, just train and come home.
Treat these as experiments rather than instructions. You are not obeying a programme, you are finding out what happens, and that difference changes how it feels to do them.
The jolt you feel when someone humiliates you is very old machinery. Where standing decided whether you ate, reacting hard to a public slight made sense. In traffic it makes none.