Somewhere along the way, “let it out” became the default advice for anger. Punch a pillow. Scream into your car. Go hit something at the gym. The logic feels almost physical: anger builds up like pressure, and pressure needs a release valve, or it will find a worse one on its own.
It’s a tidy metaphor. It borrows the logic of plumbing and applies it to something far messier: a nervous system, a memory, a story you’re telling yourself about what just happened. And it’s also not how anger actually works, at least not according to the researchers who bothered to test it directly instead of assuming it.
What actually happened in the punching bag experiment
Psychologist Brad Bushman ran a study that has become one of the more cited experiments in anger research. Participants were deliberately angered (their essays were harshly criticized by someone posing as another student), then split into groups. One group hit a punching bag while thinking about the person who’d upset them. A comparison group simply sat quietly for a couple of minutes, doing nothing at all.
Afterward, everyone got a chance to retaliate against their critic in a competitive task where the winner could blast the loser with unpleasant noise. The group that had punched the bag while ruminating set the volume higher than the group that had just sat still. In Bushman’s own results, the rumination group scored meaningfully higher on the aggression index than the do-nothing group, a statistically real gap (p < .005). Same anger-inducing setup, same measurement scale, opposite outcome from what catharsis theory predicts.
Doing nothing beat “healthy venting” outright.
Why the release theory felt so believable in the first place
Catharsis theory has a long history, going back to ideas about tragedy purging emotion through performance, and it persists because the feeling of intensity right after venting can be mistaken for relief. Your heart is pounding, you’re breathing hard, something happened. That physiological noise can feel like release even when, underneath it, the anger is still fully loaded.
There’s also a simpler reason it stuck around. Telling someone to sit with an uncomfortable feeling sounds like doing nothing. Telling them to hit something sounds like doing something. Advice that looks active tends to feel more credible, even when the passive option is the one actually backed by data.
And there’s a social layer to it too. Venting has a performance component. Telling a friend “I need to vent” signals that you’re processing something, that you’re taking your own feelings seriously. Sitting quietly by yourself doesn’t look like anything to anyone. It’s private, unglamorous, and it happens to work better.
What rumination does that stillness doesn’t
The detail that matters most in Bushman’s design isn’t the punching bag itself. It’s what people were told to think about while hitting it: the person who made them angry. That’s rumination, not release. Each hit became a small rehearsal of the offense, keeping the anger circuitry active rather than letting it wind down.
Sitting quietly, by contrast, gives the nervous system room to do what it does on its own timeline. Physiological arousal, elevated heart rate, the alert state that comes with anger, has a natural half-life. Interrupt it with more stimulation, even stimulation that feels like “getting it out,” and you extend the window instead of closing it.
I spend a lot of my working life inside emotion regulation research, and one thing that shows up constantly is this: people are far better at assuming what will calm them down than they are at actually predicting it. Intensity gets mistaken for progress. It rarely is.
Part of the confusion is that anger is genuinely useful information. It usually points at something worth addressing, a boundary crossed, an unfairness, a need that isn’t being met. The mistake isn’t feeling it. The mistake is assuming the feeling has to be physically discharged before you can think clearly about what it’s pointing at. Often it’s the opposite order: think first, however briefly, and the discharge stops feeling necessary.
Two modern versions of the same mistake
Rage rooms, the pay-to-smash-things spaces that have popped up in cities over the past decade, are catharsis theory turned into a business model. The appeal makes sense (there’s something satisfying about breaking a plate on purpose) but the same research suggests the effect is closer to novelty than regulation. You leave activated, not settled.
The quieter version happens in group chats. Venting to friends about the same conflict, on a loop, restating the offense each time, can function exactly like the rumination condition in Bushman’s study, just spread across days instead of minutes. The friends mean well. The retelling still rehearses the anger rather than releasing it.
Road rage runs on a similar mechanism. Laying on the horn, tailgating, muttering the argument you wish you’d had, all of it keeps the incident alive in your body well past the moment it ended. By the time you’re at your destination, you’ve relived the offense a dozen times over, each replay reinforcing the last.
What actually helps, according to the wider evidence
A larger and more recent analysis backs this up at scale. Researchers reviewed 154 studies involving over 10,000 participants and found a consistent pattern: activities that lower physiological arousal, like slow breathing, brief timeouts, or mindfulness, reduce anger. Activities that raise arousal, including venting and even vigorous exercise done in an angry state, generally don’t.
That’s a harder sell than “get it out.” It asks you to do less, not more, right when doing more feels urgent. In my own experience, the thing that actually works when I’m angry isn’t dramatic.
It’s closer to a walk without headphones, letting the pace of my steps slow the pace of my thinking, than to anything that resembles catharsis.
