Testing Stoic Anger-Management Technique #1
Complete this online exercise and feedback form if you want to learn a new skill
Every so often I like to ask people to provide feedback on a psychological technique. At the moment, I’m doing research for a book on the philosophy and psychology of anger, so I’ve been writing about various anger management strategies. The technique below is extremely simple, and virtually lifted straight out of the ancient Stoic literature. My experience has been that clients in therapy and coaching have found it helpful, and I believe it may have potential as an adjunct to cognitive psychotherapy for anger.
If you want to give it a try, just click the button below or follow this link to complete the online exercise. It only takes a few minutes.
Gathering your self-ratings and other feedback helps us to refine these techniques. This isn’t, of course, intended to be a controlled research study. However, simple feedback questions like the ones in this form can help refine protocols which could be tested more formally at a future date.
I’ve deliberately given minimal instructions in the online form because I want to know how people respond to the bare-bones technique, what problems they encounter, if any, and what questions they have. In reality, a technique like this would normally be delivered as one component of a more complex cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) treatment plan for anger, along with a lot more assessment and information about the problem and a variety of treatment strategies. So don’t worry too much if it seems like a fragment of something bigger, because that’s the idea.
Tips and Advice
I'll just a couple of brief points in response to some of the questions we’ve had so far. Several people asked how this could be applied to real world (in vivo) situations as well as the imaginal (in vitro) situation, a memory, which we used for the exercise script. The short answer is that, with repetition, emotional changes experienced in response to mental images tend to transfer to real world situations, and there are other strategies that can be used to facilitate this. Moreover, for many people, anger in response to memories is a major component of their problems. We chose a memory for this exercise because it’s much easier for most people to do that sort of test.
Some people said it can be challenging to focus attention on a question of this kind while experiencing anger in a real situation. That’s to be expected but the difficulty here may actually be a an integral part of the exercise. For instance, it requires significant effort to do sit ups with a weight on your chest but that’s precisely why it’s beneficial. So don’t worry if it feels hard at first to focus your attention continually on the question assigned in the exercise. Think of yourself as exercising your brain, your mental muscle, in the same way that you might do physical exercises to strengthen the muscles of your body. You’ll definitely find it easier with practice.
Likewise, you’ll notice that here we’re only asking you to do the exercise once — the bare minimum. In reality, you’d normally repeat an exercise like this at least three times, perhaps more, or just continue doing it for longer, maybe another five minutes, in one session. You’d also typically expect to repeat those sessions about once per day, for roughly 5-10 days. With more repetition, you’d expect to observe more benefit, but here we’re just interested in getting feedback on a single repetition of a few minutes’ duration. Of course, there’s nothing to prevent you from using the technique more extensively afterwards, if you choose to do so.
There are definitely other techniques, which we would expect to enhance the effects of the one described in the online form above. We’re isolating it here, though, because we want to ensure we’re getting feedback on this technique alone, and not mixing it up too much with other techniques that could affect the outcome. Although, under normal circumstances, of course, we’d want to do combine techniques that enhance each other when used together.
If you want a more comprehensive overview of anger management strategies from CBT, check out my pretty detailed article below.