Areas › Anger › Growing empathy
Four ordinary things take the edge off a hot temper: being touched by someone you trust, eating with people, moving your body hard enough to breathe, and sitting still for a few minutes a day.
None of them are about anger directly, which is the point. Exercise lowers what you are already carrying before the argument starts. A shared meal puts you among people with nothing to settle. Sitting still trains the noticing that everything else depends on. Pick the one you would actually do this week rather than the one that sounds most serious.
Qur’an and Sunnah
they give food to the poor, the orphan, and the captive, though they love it themselves (Quran 76:8). Food is described as something handed to another person, which is the part of a shared meal that does the work.
وَيُطۡعِمُونَ ٱلطَّعَامَ عَلَىٰ حُبِّهِۦ مِسۡكِينࣰ ا وَيَتِيمࣰ ا وَأَسِيرًا
they give food to the poor, the orphan, and the captive, though they love it themselves
Qur’an 76:8read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a field experiment with 139 working adults, half of them randomly assigned to begin a loving-kindness practice, the practice lifted daily positive emotions, and those emotions in turn built personal resources over time. Small daily things accumulating is the general shape being claimed here. It is one study of one practice, so read it as encouragement rather than proof for the whole list.
Fredrickson BL, Cohn MA, Coffey KA, Pek J, Finkel SM. (2008). Open hearts build lives: positive emotions, induced through loving-kindness meditation, build consequential personal resources.. Journal of personality and social psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
It is easier to keep your temper when your body is not already running hot.
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
Go long enough without company and almost anyone will do. That is worth knowing about yourself, and worth watching for in someone who lives alone.
Telling somebody one thing you are quietly embarrassed about will bring you closer than a month of pleasant conversation.
Arranging your face into a caring expression does not reliably produce the caring. Do not expect the feeling to turn up just because you set the mouth.