Daniel Goleman, in his book Emotional Intelligence, has a name for the moment you end up regretting three seconds later. He calls it the amygdala hijack. The emotional part of the brain fires off a reaction before the thinking part has even understood what is happening. By the time reason arrives, the words are already out and the email is already gone.
I read that and remembered a verse I had been taught months earlier.
In the second chapter of the Bhagwad Gita, Krishna describes a chain. You dwell on something. From dwelling grows attachment. From attachment grows desire. From desire comes anger. Anger brings confusion, confusion clouds the memory, and once the memory goes the intelligence goes with it, and the person is finished. Six steps carry you from a passing thought to a decision you cannot take back.
Goleman traced that same chain with brain scans, and Krishna traced it thousands of years before anyone owned a scanner, the two of them describing the same staircase down.
The part I keep coming back to is that the feeling itself is never the problem. The feeling is going to arrive whether you like it or not. The work lives in the gap, that half second between the trigger and the reaction, where a choice still exists. A lot of leadership happens inside that half second.
I coach for a living, so here is the coach version. You train the pause. You make the gap a little wider every time you practise, the way you build any other capacity, and on most days widening that gap turns out to be the whole job.