Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Tolerate distress
Let your hands fall open, palms up, on your lap or at your sides, and breathe there for a minute. It is oddly hard to stay in full fight with open hands.
Anger lives in the grip as much as anywhere. Opening the hands removes one part of what the body is preparing to do, and the rest of the system tends to follow a little. This is not agreeing with anyone and not letting anything go. It is buying a minute before you decide.
Qur’an and Sunnah
So be patient, Prophet, as befits you (Quran 70:5). Patience as befits you suggests holding the state with some dignity, which is roughly what open hands look like from outside.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta-analysis of dialectical behaviour therapy, the approach this posture comes from, found moderate improvements in self-harm and suicidal behaviour that held up at follow-up. That is evidence for the programme as a whole rather than for one gesture within it. Small skills like this are best understood as pieces of a package that has been tested.
Kliem, S.; Kröger, C.; Kosfelder, J. (2010). Dialectical behavior therapy for borderline personality disorder: A meta-analysis using mixed-effects modeling.. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology doi
DBT meta-analysis.
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Anger needs the body braced, so unbracing one part takes some of the fuel out of 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
A calming skill handed over at the wrong moment reads as your anger is not welcome here. For someone taught as a child that their anger was unacceptable, that is the old prohibition arriving again in kinder clothes.
Tell yourself the true thing: this feeling is real, and it is temporary. No state lasts. Ride it out.
Say it out loud before you start: you decide how much of this you feel, and when. Stopping for a bit is part of the plan, not a failure of it.