Areas › Anger › Making it stick
The work you are doing on anger does not stay in the anger box. Learning to hold an unanswered question, or to sit with what you cannot change, turns up in worry and in low patches too.
That is quietly encouraging on the days the anger part feels slow. It also means being careful about crediting every improvement to the anger work, since these are broad capacities touching several things at once. Take the spread as a bonus and stay honest about what actually shifted.
Qur’an and Sunnah
We shall smooth his way towards ease (Quran 92:7). What you build in one corner of a life has a way of easing the road in others.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a randomised trial with young people who had high levels of worry and rumination, a six week group training reduced the later onset of both anxiety and depression. One training, two different outcomes, which is what a shared underlying mechanism tends to look like. It was a prevention trial in young people rather than a study of anger, so it illustrates the reach of these skills rather than establishing it here.
Topper M, Emmelkamp PM, Watkins E, Ehring T. (2017). Prevention of anxiety disorders and depression by targeting excessive worry and rumination in adolescents and young adults: A randomized controlled trial.. Behaviour research and therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
The same few capacities sit underneath several different kinds of trouble.
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
This goes the way learning a bicycle went. You could not, then you could but only with all of your attention, then one day you rode without thinking about it. The middle bit is the ugly bit.
If the word mindfulness makes you wince, leave the word out. Paying attention to your breath, or to the sounds in the room, is the whole of it.
Sit still, choose a position, and hold it. Within seconds your body will be asking to move the chin or scratch the neck, and each of those small urges is a free repetition of letting an impulse pass.