Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Tolerate distress
Anger wants the body to do something, so let it. Breathe deeper and higher into the chest, stand up, press both palms hard into a wall, walk on the spot, push down through your feet.
Pressing against something solid gives the mobilisation an outlet with nothing broken and nobody hurt. Keep going until the charge drops a little, which usually takes a minute or two rather than ten seconds. Then sit down and see whether what you wanted to say has changed shape at all.
Qur’an and Sunnah
you humans, toiling laboriously towards your Lord, will meet Him (Quran 84:6). Effort in the body is described as the ordinary shape of a life, not as a loss of composure.
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلۡإِنسَٰنُ إِنَّكَ كَادِحٌ إِلَىٰ رَبِّكَ كَدۡحࣰ ا فَمُلَٰقِيهِ
you humans, toiling laboriously towards your Lord, will meet Him
Qur’an 84:6read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A randomised trial found that two weeks of aerobic exercise reduced fear of anxiety-related bodily sensations, plausibly by giving people repeated safe experience of a pounding heart and breathlessness. That is about fear of arousal rather than about discharging anger. It supports the broader point that moving your body on purpose changes how its strong states are experienced.
Smits JA, Berry AC, Rosenfield D, Powers MB, Behar E, Otto MW. (2008). Reducing anxiety sensitivity with exercise.. Depression and anxiety doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Anger is a body getting ready to act, so letting the action finish safely takes the pressure out of it.
When not to
Leave out the pressing and pushing if an injury or a heart condition makes exertion unwise.
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 people are not frightened of a place or an animal. They are frightened of their own racing heart, their own tears, their own anger, and it behaves like any other fear: it grows on avoidance and shrinks on careful contact.
Tell yourself the true thing: this feeling is real, and it is temporary. No state lasts. Ride it out.
Whether a feeling is nowhere to be found or far too much, the questions are the same: what breath, what movement, what sentence, what person helps me stay with this?