My fuse has got really short lately. Small things set me off and I do not like who I am becoming. Where do I start?

“Stand in awe, and sin not: commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still. Selah.”

David wrote this as an evening psalm, composed under pressure from people spreading lies about him. The line about the bed is literal: he is telling himself what to do with the heat still in his chest at the end of a bad day. Notice that he does not tell himself to stop feeling it. He tells himself where to take it before he acts on it.

“Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath: For the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God.”

James wrote to scattered Jewish believers who were poor, displaced and quarrelling with each other. His advice is not a theory about emotion, it is crowd control for a community with plenty of legitimate grievances. He puts listening first because most flare-ups are lit in the half second before we understand what was actually said. Slow, in his letter, is a skill you practise rather than a temperament you are born with.