There's a place in most mid-sized cities now where you can pay about forty dollars to put on coveralls and smash a printer with a baseball bat. Rage rooms are a whole industry built on one idea: anger is pressure, and pressure needs release. Get it out and you'll walk away lighter.
Except people walk out of rage rooms sweaty, grinning, and then feel the exact same fury flare in traffic twenty minutes later. The pressure model of anger, comforting as it is, appears to be wrong.
The myth, stated plainly: venting anger reduces anger. Punch the pillow, scream into the void, fire off the four-minute rant, write the all-caps journal entry. Everyone believes some version of it. I believed it. Then in 2024, researchers at Ohio State University checked it against 154 studies covering more than 10,000 participants and found little evidence that venting helps at all. In some cases it made anger worse.
where the steam engine in your head came from
The idea has a pedigree, which is part of why it's so sticky. Freud pictured emotions hydraulically: feelings build up like steam in a boiler, and if you don't open a valve, the lid blows. It's a fantastic metaphor. It's also, as far as anyone can measure, not how anger works. A conceptual review in the journal Societies traced the catharsis hypothesis back through decades of research and concluded that aggression is not a drive that must be vented, and that when early catharsis studies were replicated with proper controls, the results tended to come out the opposite way. Venting didn't drain the anger. It rehearsed it.
Which makes sense once you sit with it. When you rant about your coworker, you're not emptying a tank. You're re-living the offense in vivid detail, heart rate climbing to match. You're practicing being angry, and you're getting better at it.
Brad Bushman, the Ohio State professor who co-authored the 2024 meta-analysis, has spent much of his career testing catharsis theory, and his verdict is about as blunt as academic language gets: "there's not a shred of scientific evidence to support catharsis theory." Not weak evidence. Not a shred. The review, by the way, was partly inspired by the rise of rage rooms. The researchers watched an industry monetize a debunked idea and decided it was time to run the numbers.
what actually turns the dial down
Here's the reframe that makes everything click. Anger isn't a substance to be drained; it's a state. Specifically, a negative emotion paired with high physiological arousal: racing heart, breath gone shallow. The Kjærvik and Bushman analysis found that what reliably reduces anger is lowering that arousal. Turning down the heat, not opening a valve.
The things that worked across the board are almost embarrassingly unsexy: deep breathing, relaxation, mindfulness, meditation, slow yoga, progressive muscle relaxation, taking a timeout. The stuff your least dramatic friend has been suggesting for years. The stuff that feels wildly insufficient when you're furious, because fury wants an audience, not a breathing exercise.
Meanwhile, activities that raise arousal, the whole "blow off steam" category, had no overall effect on anger, and some made it worse. The standout offender was jogging. Yes, jogging. The researchers suspect its repetitive monotony can compound frustration rather than dissolve it. Your angry run might just be anger with better cardio.
This isn't a one-off finding, either. Newsweek's coverage of the review reaches back to earlier work, including a 2013 study in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology on people who behaved aggressively after being provoked. The evidence has pointed the same direction for a long time. The steam model just refuses to die, because it feels true in the moment.
Venting feels like doing something.
okay, but it is complicated
Two honest caveats, because the research earns them.
First, not all arousal is equal. The same review found that ball sports and playful physical activity actually decreased anger, probably because play evokes positive emotion; you're worked up, but you're not marinating in the grievance. So the rule isn't "never move your body." It's "don't move your body while replaying the fight in your head." Pickup basketball, fine. Furious solo jog while mentally drafting the text you shouldn't send, not fine.
Second, and this matters if you keep a journal: the correction is not "stop expressing your feelings." That would be its own myth, and a worse one. The full meta-analysis is about arousal, not expression. Talking about what happened isn't the problem. Talking about it in a way that keeps your heart rate spiking is.
Which means there are two very different things people call "getting it off my chest." One is the spiral: louder and faster with every retelling, arousal climbing. That's venting, and the evidence says it keeps the fire fed. The other is slower. You describe what happened, you breathe between sentences, you get curious about what's actually underneath the anger — usually hurt, or the feeling of not being seen. Arousal comes down while the processing happens. Same subject matter. Opposite physiology.
That distinction is a big part of why we built Joice the way we did. Talking out loud about what's bothering you is good; a listener that asks a gentle question and slows you down beats a punching bag that lets you swing harder. We never wanted to build a rage room for your voice. The point is to say the thing in a way that cools you while you process it, not reheats you.
So here's the correction to walk away with. "I just need to let it out" is folk physics, not psychology. Anger isn't steam. There's no tank to empty, and every furious rehearsal is a rep, not a release.
The experiment worth running is on yourself, mid-fury: is the thing I'm reaching for — the rant, the run, the all-caps entry — turning my internal volume up or down? That one question, asked honestly, does more than any pillow ever absorbed.