Areas › Anger › Cool the body first
If techniques and explanations are not for you, carry a bottle of water and drink it down whenever you feel yourself going up. That is the whole method.
Some people want something to do, not something to understand, and that is a perfectly reasonable way to be. A bottle in your bag or your van is a reminder you do not have to remember, and finishing it gives the episode a definite end rather than leaving it trailing. Refill it afterwards and you are set up for the next time.
Qur’an and Sunnah
He sent down water from the sky to cleanse you, to make your hearts strong and your feet firm (Quran 8:11). Frightened people are described as being settled through something as plain as water, which is about the size of this suggestion.
إِذۡ يُغَشِّيكُمُ ٱلنُّعَاسَ أَمَنَةࣰ مِّنۡهُ وَيُنَزِّلُ عَلَيۡكُم مِّنَ ٱلسَّمَآءِ مَآءࣰ لِّيُطَهِّرَكُم بِهِۦ وَيُذۡهِبَ عَنكُمۡ رِجۡزَ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنِ وَلِيَرۡبِطَ عَلَىٰ قُلُوبِكُمۡ وَيُثَبِّتَ بِهِ ٱلۡأَقۡدَامَ
Remember when He gave you sleep as a reassurance from Him, and sent down water from the sky to cleanse you, to remove Satan’s pollution from you, to make your hearts strong and your feet firm
Qur’an 8:11read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Plain behavioural changes can carry real weight. In a small randomised controlled trial, inactive adults with insomnia who simply reached standard public health activity levels improved their sleep quality and mood, with no complicated programme involved. The trial had forty one participants and was about activity rather than water, so read it as support for keeping the instruction simple rather than as evidence for the bottle.
Hartescu I, Morgan K, Stevinson CD. (2015). Increased physical activity improves sleep and mood outcomes in inactive people with insomnia: a randomized controlled trial.. Journal of sleep research doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
An object you carry does the remembering for you, at the moment when remembering is the thing you cannot do.
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
Keep a few purely physical moves in your kit: sip, hum, sit, look away. At the top of a flare, thinking your way out is the one thing that is not available.
The out breath is the part that quiets things down. Cells in the brain's alarm centres behave differently across the two phases of a breath, and breathing out is the calming side of that cycle.
Anger has a shape you can learn: jaw tightening, breathing heavier, heat in the face, and often a strange busyness in the hands. Find your own two or three.