Areas › Anger › What you are actually defending
Your mind is always slightly behind what is happening. Reality moves and you are the response, which leaves you permanently a step late and permanently not quite sure.
Put that way, uncertainty is not a flaw in your thinking, it is the position you are standing in. You are flying into the next moment without having seen it yet. There is a strange comfort in that, and it takes some of the shame out of being wrong, which is one of the things anger is usually protecting you from.
Qur’an and Sunnah
God knows what they conceal and what they reveal (Quran 16:23). Complete knowledge is placed with God, which quietly concedes that yours is partial.
لَا جَرَمَ أَنَّ ٱللَّهَ يَعۡلَمُ مَا يُسِرُّونَ وَمَا يُعۡلِنُونَۚ إِنَّهُۥ لَا يُحِبُّ ٱلۡمُسۡتَكۡبِرِينَ
There is no doubt that God knows what they conceal and what they reveal. He does not love the arrogant
Qur’an 16:23read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a pharmacological challenge study, physiological levels of testosterone rapidly increased how strongly the brain reacted to threat cues in healthy men, and a small placebo controlled study of twelve participants found a similar rise in responsiveness to social threat. Both point at threat processing running fast and early, ahead of anything deliberate. Both were small and involved giving men a hormone, so they say nothing about anybody's ordinary Tuesday.
Goetz SM, Tang L, Thomason ME, Diamond MP, Hariri AR, Carré JM. (2014). Testosterone rapidly increases neural reactivity to threat in healthy men: a novel two-step pharmacological challenge paradigm.. Biological psychiatry doi
Hermans EJ, Ramsey NF, van Honk J. (2008). Exogenous testosterone enhances responsiveness to social threat in the neural circuitry of social aggression in humans.. Biological psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
You cannot be certain about something you are still catching up with.
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
Righteous anger pays you something. It burns off doubt, hands back a sense of being in charge, and can feel very close to intoxicating.
Understand more so that you may fear less. That line is the whole point of learning how your anger works: not cleverness, just less fear.
Understanding an idea is not the same as being changed by it. The explaining is soil preparation, and the crop comes later.