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Calm the body to calm the fight
Tone feeds itself
Tone can be a virtuous cycle or a vicious one. A happy, laughing person laughs again at the next joke, which is why comedy shows put on warm-up acts before the main one. Someone shouting in an aggressive tone is in an emotional fight-or-flight state, and anything said to them, however right, gets blown away by their reptile brain.
The timeout
The move is a timeout. In a debate about religion where the other person is getting heated, a gentle remark that the conversation doesn't seem to be going well, that they seem a little heated, and that maybe it's time to drop it and talk about something else.
The reset
They either agree and move on, avoiding the blowup, or insist on continuing but notice they were getting heated and check themselves. Gently calling out body language and tone resets someone to a more neutral place, and without aggressive or defensive body language, they are more open-minded.
Why do comedy shows use warm-up acts?
Psychologists Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo, and Richard Rapson described emotional contagion in a 1993 book of that name. They argued that people automatically mimic the expressions, voices, and postures of those around them and then come to feel what they mimic. A laughing room spreads laughter from person to person. A warm-up comedian gets an audience laughing before the main show starts, so the mood carries over.
What happens in the body during fight-or-flight?
Physiologist Walter Cannon coined the phrase fight or flight in the early twentieth century. When the brain senses a threat, the sympathetic nervous system signals the adrenal glands to release adrenaline. Heart rate and breathing rise, and blood flow shifts toward the large muscles. Higher-level thinking is not what this response prioritizes, which is why reasoning with a person in that state rarely works.
How long does it take to calm down mid-argument?
Gottman's research suggests that physiological calming after flooding takes at least twenty minutes. Heart rate and stress hormones need that time to drop even when the topic is set aside. A break shorter than that tends to leave the body still in an aroused state. Gottman's lab measured this using heart rate monitors during couples' conflict discussions.