Areas › Anger › Growing empathy
You are allowed to try something because it seems sensible. What you should not do is tell yourself it is proven, because that is what stops you noticing when it does not work for you.
The idea that going without company makes you hungrier for it is a reasonable guess, and mostly still a guess. Keep it in that shape. If a quieter week sends you back gentler, good, keep it. If it sends you back flatter, the guess was wrong for you, and dressing it up as science would only have made that harder to admit.
Qur’an and Sunnah
What will explain to you what the steep path is (Quran 90:12). The verse opens with a question rather than an assertion, and there is something to learn from that shape.
وَمَآ أَدۡرَىٰكَ مَا ٱلۡعَقَبَةُ
What will explain to you what the steep path is
Qur’an 90:12read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A review of loving-kindness and compassion meditation sets out the techniques alongside the early empirical work, and is candid that the trial base behind it was small at the time. That is what a fair account of a young idea sounds like. Worth copying whenever you catch yourself explaining your own habits with a mechanism.
Hofmann SG, Grossman P, Hinton DE. (2011). Loving-kindness and compassion meditation: potential for psychological interventions.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A belief you hold as settled cannot be corrected by what actually happens to you.
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
Repeating back what your partner said proves you were listening. It does not prove you were touched by it, and they can tell the difference.
Feeling close to your own people does not automatically make you kinder to everybody else. Sometimes it does the opposite and sharpens the line between us and them.
You can drop the neuroscience and keep the instruction. Look at the person's face, and at their eyes in particular, and let what you see land on you.