Does Venting Anger Help? A Review of 154 Studies Says Calm Down Instead

Activities that raise arousal, like hitting a punching bag or jogging, did not reduce anger overall. Activities that lower arousal, like deep breathing and meditation, reduced both anger and aggression. That is the result of a meta-analysis of 154 studies, published in Clinical Psychology Review in 2024.

In the Brain Mondo short video, I covered this study in about 40 seconds. In this post I go through what the numbers mean, the older experiments that tested the idea that venting makes you feel better, and what to do when you feel your temper rising.

Video: Should you vent your anger? (Japanese)

The video is in Japanese.

The idea that venting makes you feel better

Bottling up anger is bad for you, so it is better to let it all out. This belief is widely held. In psychology, the idea that releasing an emotion makes you feel lighter is called catharsis.

At the same time, anger comes with arousal: your heart pounds and your body heats up. Hitting a punching bag and going for a run both push that arousal even higher. Is it better to raise the arousal and let it out, or to bring it down? That is what Kjærvik and Bushman, researchers in the United States, set out to examine.

What the study did

This study is a meta-analysis. A meta-analysis collects the results of many studies on the same topic and uses statistics to see what the overall pattern is.

It brought together 154 studies, which included 184 independent samples and 10,189 participants in total.

Anger management activities were split into two types. One was activities that lower arousal, such as deep breathing, mindfulness and meditation. The other was activities that raise arousal, such as hitting a bag, jogging and cycling.

The result: only calming down reduced anger

Activities that lowered arousal reduced anger and aggression. The effect size was g = -0.63, and the paper says the result was robust, meaning it held up when checked in different ways.

Activities that raised arousal, on the other hand, were ineffective overall. The effect size was g = -0.02, essentially zero.

For g, zero means no effect, and the larger the number in absolute terms, the larger the effect. There is a clear gap between -0.63 and -0.02. The authors conclude that the findings do not support the idea that venting anger or going for a run are effective ways to manage anger.

For all kinds of people, in all kinds of formats

The video says the effect was the same across gender, age and culture. The abstract goes into a little more detail.

The effects of calming activities were stable over time for participants of different genders, races, ages and cultures. They worked for students and non-students, for criminal offenders and non-offenders, and for people with and without intellectual disabilities.

How the activities were delivered didn’t matter either. They worked through digital platforms, when taught by researchers, and when taught by therapists, in group and individual sessions, and in both field and laboratory settings.

The arousal-raising activities, by contrast, are described as having heterogeneous and complex results across studies. Taken as a whole, they did not add up to a consistent effect.

The experiment where hitting made anger worse

Bushman, one of the authors of this meta-analysis, has been testing this question in experiments for more than 20 years.

In an experiment published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2002, participants were first deliberately made angry. Then one group hit a punching bag while thinking about the person who had angered them. Another group hit the bag while thinking about getting physically fit. A third group did not hit the bag at all.

When asked how angry they felt afterward, the group that thought about the person while hitting was the angriest. Then participants got the chance to blast the person who had angered them with loud noise. The most aggressive were those who had thought about the person while hitting, followed by those who had thought about fitness, and then those who hadn’t hit the bag. The paper says that doing nothing at all was more effective than venting anger.

In a 1999 experiment, participants who read a message saying that aggressive action is a good way to relax and reduce anger then wanted to hit a punching bag more. And those who read that message and actually hit the bag were afterward more aggressive than those who had read the opposite message. Believing that venting makes you feel better was itself pushing behavior toward aggression.

Limits and common misreadings

A few points are worth keeping in mind.

First, what is being compared here is the effect as a way to manage anger. Whether jogging or cycling is good for your body was not part of this meta-analysis. What this study tells us is that you can’t count on them to calm your anger.

Second, what “venting” covers. This meta-analysis sorted activities by whether they raise or lower arousal. Something like explaining the situation to someone you trust and working out together what to do is not central to that comparison. All the abstract lets us say is that letting anger out by raising your body’s arousal was not supported.

Third, a meta-analysis pulls many studies together, so it depends on the quality of those studies. The scattered results for arousal-raising activities may come from how different the conditions were from study to study.

Using it in daily life

The paper sums up that a more effective approach for managing anger is to “turn down the heat” by doing things that lower arousal. Here are three ways to apply this study to daily life.

• When you flare up, breathe first. Breathe out slowly, several times. Writing a reply or arguing back can come after that.
• Don’t exercise while thinking about the person. In the 2002 experiment, the group that pictured the person who angered them while hitting ended up the angriest and the most aggressive. Using anger as fuel for physical activity seems to backfire.
• Question “letting it out will make me feel better.” Think back on times you fired off an angry message or took it out on an object, and ask whether you actually felt any lighter.

Brain Mondo is a series of short daily videos about the brain, each based on a research paper. BrainDojo is an app for a few minutes a day of training in calculation, memory, attention and more. The Brain Dojo Check, once a day, gives you scores for processing speed, inhibition and short-term memory. The inhibition test looks at your ability to stop a reaction that is about to come out. You can watch how your own brakes work through your day-to-day scores.

References

• Kjærvik SL, Bushman BJ. A meta-analytic review of anger management activities that increase or decrease arousal: What fuels or douses rage? Clin Psychol Rev. 2024;109:102414.
• Bushman BJ. Does venting anger feed or extinguish the flame? Catharsis, rumination, distraction, anger, and aggressive responding. Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2002;28(6):724-731.
• Bushman BJ, Baumeister RF, Stack AD. Catharsis, aggression, and persuasive influence: self-fulfilling or self-defeating prophecies? J Pers Soc Psychol. 1999;76(3):367-376.