Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Emotions as signals
Go back to the second before you reacted. Not the argument, not the history, just that one second and what crossed you in it.
Most people have to genuinely search for the answer, and the searching is where the work happens rather than in whatever they eventually say. Sometimes it is a look, a tone, a word that sounded like something an old voice used to say. If you are helping someone else with this, leave the silence alone while they look, because the answer they hand you quickly is usually the one they already had.
Qur’an and Sunnah
by the self-reproaching soul (Quran 75:2). The soul that turns back and looks at what it just did is honoured with an oath, which suggests the looking is worth something.
وَلَآ أُقۡسِمُ بِٱلنَّفۡسِ ٱللَّوَّامَةِ
and by the self-reproaching soul
Qur’an 75:2read 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 experimental studies found that how well an emotion regulation strategy works varies a great deal, and that differences within a family of strategies mattered as much as differences between families, with cognitive change averaging a small to medium effect. In other words, the care you take over a method matters as much as which method it is. These were short laboratory tasks, which sets a limit on how far to carry the numbers.
Webb TL, Miles E, Sheeran P. (2012). Dealing with feeling: a meta-analysis of the effectiveness of strategies derived from the process model of emotion regulation.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Reactions run faster than awareness, so you have to stop the tape to see what actually started it.
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
Let what they say land in you before you answer. The word that catches somewhere in your own chest is usually the live one.
If someone is saying so much that you have lost the thread, stop them kindly and check. Sorry, that is a lot and it matters, can I say back what I have got so far.
I am used to it is not the same as I feel nothing. It usually means a great deal of practice at feeling nothing, and that practice costs something.