This session is one chart: anger intensity from zero to ten, what the body is doing at each number, and the line at seven past which reasoning stops taking calls. Every skill in the program is placed somewhere on this chart, so it's worth twelve minutes to learn it properly.
Picture anger intensity on a scale of zero to ten. Zero is baseline. At three the body has started (some heat, some tension in the jaw or hands) but your thinking is fully online. At five you're clearly angry and still the one driving. As the number climbs, the body does what alarm systems are built to do: adrenaline up, heart rate up, muscles loaded for action. In a genuine emergency that's the right equipment. The cost is that with every point, attention narrows and the list of things you can think of doing gets shorter.
Around seven, the reasoning part of the brain effectively goes offline and an older, faster system takes over. Past that line you don't have less self-control, you have almost no access to it. Which explains a long-standing mystery: why "just calm down" has never once worked on you at a nine. The advice is fine. It arrives at a system that can no longer process it. Reasoning with a nine is like negotiating with a fire alarm.
Every skill you'll learn here works below seven, and most work best below five. So the first thing to train isn't calming down at all, it's noticing sooner. The level where you first notice is your caught-at number, and moving it down the curve is most of what these six weeks are for. Most people start out catching at seven or higher. That's a baseline, not a character reading.
One thing before any training starts. The alarm is usually right, in the sense that something really did matter. Nothing in this program argues with that. What we examine is the bill: what the response cost, and whether the thing that mattered actually got fixed. Alarm honored, bill examined. That's the arrangement, every time.