Areas › Anger › Equanimity and perspective
Hold up a cup and ask what it is. A cup, a container, a weapon, a paperweight, an odd object to a creature with no hands. The answer depends on who is asking.
Starting with a mundane object matters, because it is easy to concede there. Then carry it across: what someone said this morning is a fact, what it meant is assigned, and you were the one assigning. That does not make every reading as good as every other, only fewer of them final.
Qur’an and Sunnah
even though the Hereafter is better and more lasting (Quran 87:17). What a thing is worth depends on what you are holding it up against.
وَٱلۡأٓخِرَةُ خَيۡرࣱ وَأَبۡقَىٰٓ
even though the Hereafter is better and more lasting
Qur’an 87:17read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis of randomised trials found that even self guided smartphone apps can teach acceptance, mindfulness and self compassion, with small effects against control conditions. Ways of relating to your own experience behave like teachable skills rather than fixed features of a person. The effects were small, which is the honest size for something learned a few minutes at a time.
Linardon J. (2020). Can Acceptance, Mindfulness, and Self-Compassion Be Learned by Smartphone Apps? A Systematic and Meta-Analytic Review of Randomized Controlled Trials.. Behavior therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
What a thing means depends on the frame you are holding, and frames can be changed while facts cannot.
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
Some reactions really do just happen, like a wind up toy pointed forwards, banging into whatever is in the way. That is a description of the problem rather than an excuse for it.
You do not have to jump straight to understanding. Try the step before it: hands open, honestly puzzled, help me see what just happened here.
Practising the perfect reply in your head feels like letting off steam. It works more like rehearsal, and what you rehearse gets easier to perform.