A shared universe › Blog › What to do with anger · Español
“Let it out, or it will eat you up inside.” It is one of the most repeated pieces of advice when someone is furious: shout, slam a door, hit a cushion. It sounds logical. Research, however, says it works the opposite way from how it seems.
Behind that advice lies a very common image: anger is like the steam in a pressure cooker, which will end up exploding if it isn’t released. That release has a name, catharsis, a Greek word meaning purification or cleansing. In the late nineteenth century, the doctors Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud used it for a method in which their patients expressed stored emotions and memories. Since then, the idea that venting cleanses you inside has been repeated so often that it seems like common sense.
In 2002, the psychologist Brad Bushman, then at Iowa State University, put it to the test. First he made a group of volunteers angry in the laboratory. Then he gave some of them a punchbag and asked them to think about the person who had angered them while they hit it. Others hit the bag while thinking about getting fit. A third group hit nothing.
Those who hit the bag thinking about the person who had angered them were the ones who felt most anger afterwards, and also the most aggressive when they had the chance to annoy that person with loud noises. Those who did nothing were the least aggressive. Venting by hitting things didn’t put the anger out: it fanned it.
In 2024, Sophie Kjærvik and Bushman himself, at Ohio State University, brought together 154 studies with more than ten thousand people. Activities that calm the body, such as deep, slow breathing, mindfulness or meditation, reduced anger and aggression. Those that speed it up, such as hitting a bag, running or cycling, did not reduce it overall. Going for a run can do you good for many reasons, but it doesn’t seem to be the best way to bring down anger.
That venting doesn’t work doesn’t mean that anger is bad. It is an emotion as human as sadness or fear, and it warns of something. A team from the University of California, Santa Barbara, including Aaron Sell, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, studied what triggers it in six very different cultures, from the United States or India to the Shuar people in the Ecuadorian Amazon. According to their explanation, which they tested in all of them, anger flares when we feel that someone has not taken our welfare into account, has treated us as if we mattered little. And it serves to demand better treatment.
More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle already wrote in the Nicomachean Ethics that getting angry is easy, and that what is hard is doing it with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right reason and in the right way. He did not ask people to stop feeling anger, but to know what to do with it.
That is why it helps to ask yourself, once the first heat has gone down, what it was that hurt: an injustice, a lack of respect, not being taken into account, a boundary that someone has crossed. Naming it is the first step towards doing something useful with it.
In the first few minutes, what helps most is letting the body come down:
Once your body has come down, anger can become something useful: a conversation, a boundary, a well-made complaint. It helps to talk about what happened and how you felt, rather than attacking the person: “When you cancelled the plan at the last minute I felt unimportant” is heard better than “You always do the same thing”.
It also helps to tell someone who isn’t caught up in it and who can listen without stoking it. Not to repeat the offence, which lights it again, but to look at it with fresh eyes. And sometimes, after talking, the moment comes to apologise or forgive.
It is worth talking to your doctor if you find it hard to control your anger however hard you try, if it leads you to shout, break things or hurt people, or if it comes with stress, anxiety or sadness that last more than two weeks. There are programmes for learning to manage it, which combine support and techniques from cognitive behavioural therapy.
And if the anger that worries you is someone else’s and it frightens you, you also deserve help, and you can ask for it. In Spain you can talk to a person at the Teléfono de la Esperanza, 717 003 717, at any time. If you are thinking of ending your life, call 024: it is free and answered 24 hours a day. If you are in another country, call your local emergency number or a helpline there.
A star with “What weighs on me” leaves no room to go over the offence in full detail, and that helps: it makes you say what hurt. Whoever reads it won’t judge you; they will leave you a few words of comfort.