Areas › Anger › Practising under provocation
Let yourself be five minutes late to something that does not matter. Then ask how you would feel if a friend were five minutes late to you.
Most people find they would not mind at all, which puts the difference in plain view. The standard you hold yourself to is often far harsher than the one you use for everybody else, and lateness is a cheap way to see it. The noticing is what does the work here, not the lateness.
Qur’an and Sunnah
If a person is patient and forgives, this is one of the greatest things (Quran 42:43). The patience you extend easily to a friend is worth extending to yourself.
وَلَمَن صَبَرَ وَغَفَرَ إِنَّ ذَٰلِكَ لَمِنۡ عَزۡمِ ٱلۡأُمُورِ
though if a person is patient and forgives, this is one of the greatest things
Qur’an 42:43read 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, how people mentally handled a recent anger provoking event, rather than whether they revisited it at all, determined how much anger stayed with them. Going back over something is not automatically harmful, and the manner of going over it is what counts. It was a controlled study of a recalled event, so it points at a mechanism rather than measuring ordinary life.
Ray RD, Wilhelm FH, Gross JJ. (2008). All in the mind's eye? Anger rumination and reappraisal.. Journal of personality and social psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Comparing the rule you use on yourself with the one you use on others makes an unfair rule hard to keep.
When not to
Skip this one if your lateness already costs other people, or if being kept waiting is a real sore point for you rather than a small one.
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 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.
Some people move through the day half expecting to be slighted, and the scanning itself wears them out. If most days seem to contain someone who did not give you your due, part of the pattern may be in the looking.
Practise not needing the praise, not only the approval. If a compliment can lift you that much, the same dial is being turned when somebody criticises you.