Venting on a punching bag fed anger in a lab, and calmer skills work better

Key takeaways

• In a 2002 study of 600 college students, those who hit a punching bag while thinking about a harsh critic ended up angrier than students who simply sat quietly.
• A 2024 review of 154 studies found that calming activities such as deep breathing, meditation and taking a time-out reduced anger, while revving activities like jogging generally didn’t.
• Across 306 experimental comparisons, taking another person’s point of view and rethinking what a situation means eased feelings more than trying to push them away.
• Putting a feeling into words, such as “I’m scared,” quieted the brain’s alarm center in a small UCLA scanning study and helped people afraid of spiders get closer to a tarantula.
• Get help if your emotions keep getting in the way of daily life or won’t ease up, and call or text 988 in a crisis.

At Iowa State University, 600 college students each wrote a short essay about abortion. Each got it back with poor ratings and a handwritten note calling it one of the worst essays the reader had seen¹. The critic didn’t exist. The insult was the experiment.

Then psychologist Brad Bushman handed many of them a punching bag. One group pounded it while looking at a photo of the supposed critic and dwelling on that person. A second group hit it while thinking about getting fit. A third group skipped the bag and sat quietly for two minutes¹.

The bag didn’t drain the anger. Students who hit it while dwelling on the critic ended up angrier than both other groups. In a later reaction-time contest, they also picked harsher noise blasts for the critic than the quiet group did¹. Hitting the bag while thinking about fitness left people about as angry as sitting still¹.

Doing nothing at all was more effective than venting, Bushman concluded in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin¹.

Later research points the same way. In 2024, Bushman and Sophie Kjærvik, who did the work for her Ohio State dissertation, pooled 154 studies of more than 10,000 people. According to Ohio State’s summary of the review, turning the body’s arousal down, not up, was what eased anger². The rise of rage rooms, where people smash glass, plates and electronics, helped inspire the project².

Emotional regulation means the ways you shape your feelings: where you point your attention, how you read a situation and how much you show³⁴. And it’s a skill. In hundreds of experiments, people who were simply told to try a strategy felt different afterward, better or worse depending on which one they used⁴.

Feelings unfold over time, and so do your chances to steer them

Stanford psychologist James Gross and Oliver John of the University of California, Berkeley, sort strategies by when they act. Some work early, before a feeling has fully built. Others work late, once it’s already underway³.

Reappraisal is an early strategy. It means reading a situation in a new way so it hits you differently³. A driver who cuts you off becomes a person rushing to the hospital, or simply someone who made a mistake.

Suppression is a late strategy. It means holding back the outward signs of a feeling, such as keeping a straight face while you seethe inside³.

In 2012, Thomas Webb and colleagues at the University of Sheffield pooled 306 experimental comparisons of these strategies, grouped by whether they changed attention, thinking or the response⁴. Changing how you think had the biggest average effect. Changing attention averaged out to roughly zero, because one form helped and another hurt⁴. Britain’s Economic and Social Research Council funded the work⁴.

Reframing usually beats bottling it up

In five studies of everyday habits, mostly with college students, Gross and John found that people who often reappraised felt and showed more positive and less negative emotion, by their own reports and their friends’ ratings³.

They also shared their feelings more, had closer relationships and were better liked. They reported fewer symptoms of depression and more satisfaction with life³.

Habitual suppressors showed the reverse. They felt more negative emotion, shared less, kept others at a distance and felt less supported³. These were surveys of habits, so they show links, not proof that one style causes the other.

The Sheffield experiments fill in cause and effect. Taking another person’s perspective was the strongest strategy tested. Rethinking the upsetting event itself also worked well⁴.

Trying not to feel the emotion did essentially nothing, and pushing away thoughts of the event did slightly worse⁴.

There’s a twist: keeping a poker face helped about as much as some kinds of reframing⁴. In two 2024 studies, hiding your expression eased momentary bad feelings compared with doing nothing, though reappraisal worked better⁵.

The 2024 authors point to research linking suppression to poorer well-being around close others, but not around people you’re less close to⁵. In studies of Chinese participants and Asian Americans with bicultural values, suppression typically wasn’t tied to poorer well-being⁵.

The practical lesson: a calm face in a tense meeting is fine. Hiding your feelings from the people closest to you, week after week, may cost more.

Naming a feeling can turn down the brain’s alarm

In a 2007 study at UCLA, 30 adults lay in a brain scanner and looked at photos of angry or frightened faces. Sometimes they picked an emotion word, such as “angry” or “scared,” to match the face. Other times they picked a name that matched the person’s gender⁶.

Choosing the emotion word quieted the amygdala, a small region deep in the brain that helps sound the alarm. It also switched on an area in the right front part of the brain. The more that area lit up, the quieter the amygdala got⁶.

The limits: 30 people is a small group, the study measured brain activity rather than daily life, and the authors weren’t sure words themselves were essential⁶.

In a 2012 UCLA follow-up with 88 people afraid of spiders, volunteers stood near a tarantula and talked in one of four ways⁷. Some described their feelings, saying for example that they felt anxious and frightened. Others used calming words to make the spider seem less threatening, talked about something unrelated, or said nothing⁷.

A week later, the feeling-namers got closer to a live tarantula, and their hands sweated less⁷. The more negative words they had used, the better they did⁷. The study was small and tested only one fear, so treat it as a promising lead.

The popular phrase “name it to tame it” sums it up: you don’t have to like the feeling, just call it what it is.

Brooding feels like problem-solving, but usually it isn’t

Psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema spent her career studying rumination: replaying your distress over and over, along with its causes and what it might mean. Her response styles theory, first proposed in 1991, holds that dwelling this way keeps low moods going⁸.

In 2008, she and two colleagues took stock of the evidence, and the well-supported findings are sobering. Brooding feeds depression and gloomy thinking. It also makes problems harder to solve, keeps people from acting and drives away friends who might help⁸.

Distraction has a better record in the short run. Surveys linking it to fewer symptoms are mixed, but dozens of experiments show that a positive distraction lifts a low mood⁸. In the Sheffield review, distraction helped, while focusing hard on the emotional parts of a situation made people feel worse⁴.

Distraction is a bridge, not a place to live. Our advice: use it to cool down, then come back to the problem when you can think clearly.

The 2008 review also separates rumination from more useful kinds of self-reflection⁸. Thinking about a problem isn’t the trouble. Circling it for hours without a next step is.

Blowing off steam keeps the fire burning

Venting can feel good. In Bushman’s study, men rated how much they enjoyed hitting the bag at about 6 on a 10-point scale, and women at about 5¹. Enjoying it didn’t make them calmer.

According to Ohio State’s summary of the 2024 review, the anger-lowering list included deep or belly breathing, relaxation, mindfulness, meditation, slow-flow yoga, progressive muscle relaxation and taking a time-out².

Those methods helped in labs and out in the world, whether taught on a screen or face to face. College students benefited, and so did people with criminal histories and people with intellectual disabilities².

On the other side sat activities that rev the body up. Hitting a bag, jogging, cycling and swimming generally didn’t lower anger, and jogging was the likeliest to raise it². Physical education classes and ball sports bucked the trend and calmed people down. The researchers suggested that an element of play may help².

The review didn’t test rage rooms directly². But smashing things is the kind of high-arousal activity it found unhelpful, so we’d skip them as an anger fix. That’s our reading, not a tested finding.

When anger is about a real problem, the CDC suggests learning anger management or assertive communication to handle it in healthy ways¹¹.

Let the feeling be there, then plan your next move

Acceptance means letting a feeling exist without fighting it, which isn’t the same as giving in to it. The Sheffield review hints at why this matters: trying to stop a feeling or shove away thoughts about it didn’t help⁴. The CDC suggests the same spirit: acknowledge hard emotions, and be patient with yourself¹¹.

Two structured therapies teach related skills. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) offers acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) for depression in 12 to 16 one-on-one sessions that center on facing what you’ve been avoiding and moving toward what you value¹⁵. Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), which the VA uses for borderline personality disorder, teaches four skill sets: mindfulness, emotion regulation, distress tolerance and interpersonal effectiveness¹⁵.

Planning ahead can help, too. An “if-then plan” ties a trigger to a response: “If I start to feel panicky in line, then I’ll slow my breathing.” In 2012, Webb and colleagues pooled studies of these plans for managing emotions⁹.

If-then plans worked much better than no instructions. They also beat plain goals like “I won’t get upset,” which helped only a little⁹. The effects were largest for fear, in studies that included people afraid of spiders⁹.

Two cautions. Some of those fear studies came from two of the review’s own authors. And published studies showed bigger effects than unpublished ones, a sign that the true benefit may be smaller⁹.

Therapists teach these skills directly. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) describes cognitive behavioral therapy as learning to spot inaccurate or harmful automatic thoughts, question them and change the patterns that follow¹².

A pick-a-strategy guide and a five-step practice

These tools cost nothing, need no product and draw on your body’s own ability to settle, values many natural-health readers hold. They’re our design, built from the studies above, and haven’t been tested as a package.

Situation	Strategies that fit	Evidence	What to avoid
Hot anger right after an insult	Slow breathing, a time-out, relaxation2	Strong for calming activities	Hitting or smashing things; replaying the insult12
Fear before something you must face	Name the feeling out loud7; an if-then plan9	Promising but early	Trying not to feel it4
Hurt by someone you love	Consider their point of view; reframe4	Strong in short-term experiments	Hiding it from them for weeks5
Upset about something you can’t fix tonight	A positive distraction8	Strong for short-term relief	Going over it again and again8
Low mood that keeps returning	Talk with someone; see a professional1011	See “When to get help”	Waiting it out alone

The five-step practice: pause, name, reframe, act, review

1. Pause. Take one slow breath, longer on the way out. If you’re very heated, step away for a few minutes.
2. Name. Say or write one or two words for the feeling: “angry,” “embarrassed,” “scared.”
3. Reframe. Ask one question: “What’s another way to see this?” or “How would the other person describe it?”
4. Act. Pick one next step: solve something, ask for something, set it aside until tomorrow, or distract yourself on purpose.
5. Review. Later that day, jot down what you felt, what you tried and how it went. Over a few weeks, you’ll see which steps work for you.

To make it stick, write one if-then plan for your most common trigger, such as “If my teenager slams a door, then I’ll take three slow breaths before I speak.”

What the evidence says, rated

Strategy or claim	Evidence level	What studies found
Calming activities reduce anger	Strong evidence	154 studies, many settings and groups2
Hitting a bag or venting reduces anger	Evidence says no	Raised anger in a 600-person experiment; not supported in the review12
Reappraisal and perspective taking ease feelings in the moment	Strong evidence	306 experimental comparisons4
Habitual reappraisers fare better in life	Promising but early	Consistent links in five studies; cause unproven3
Distraction gives short-term relief	Strong evidence	Dozens of experiments; a second review agrees48
Rumination worsens depression	Strong evidence	Well supported in a major review8
Naming feelings calms fear	Promising but early	Small brain and spider studies67
If-then plans help manage emotions	Promising but early	Large pooled effects that may be inflated9
Habitually hiding feelings harms close relationships	Promising but early	Links seen; costs depend on setting and culture35
Rage rooms relieve anger	Not enough evidence	Not directly tested; high-arousal activities didn’t help2

When feelings are hard to manage, get help

Talk with a doctor or mental health professional if:

• stress or strong feelings get in the way of everyday life¹⁰¹¹;
• you start avoiding things because of how you feel¹⁰;
• the stress or distress seems always present¹⁰;
• you’re struggling to cope, or your symptoms won’t go away¹⁰¹¹;
• sadness lingers, which can be a sign of depression¹¹.

For a child, talk with the pediatrician if your child seems withdrawn or unhappy, has trouble at school or with friends, or can’t control their behavior or anger¹³. NIMH advises seeking help if worrying behaviors last weeks or longer, and getting help right away if a child talks about hurting themselves or someone else¹⁴.

When you look for a therapist, NIMH suggests asking about their training, their approach and the evidence behind it, and their costs¹².

If you or someone you know is in crisis or thinking about suicide, call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org¹². In a life-threatening emergency, call 911¹⁴.

Questions readers ask

The bottom line

How you handle a feeling matters more than whether you have it. The best-supported moves are simple: calm your body when you’re heated, put the feeling into words, look at the situation from another angle and use distraction as a short bridge back to solving what you can.

The popular advice to let it all out by hitting something doesn’t hold up. Venting and brooding tend to feed the feelings they promise to release. If emotions keep getting in the way of your life, that’s a reason to get skilled help, not a personal failing.

Related reading

• Worry gets louder at 3 a.m., and a few tested tricks can turn it down
• Moving can ease anxiety, though viral shaking and somatic workouts are less proven
• Writing down what you do helps you change, while brooding on the page doesn’t
• How to tell psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists apart
• Chronic stress adds up in the body, and two famous studies need a second look

Sources

1. Bushman BJ. “Does Venting Anger Feed or Extinguish the Flame? Catharsis, Rumination, Distraction, Anger, and Aggressive Responding.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2002;28(6):724–731 (author copy). public.websites.umich.edu
2. Ohio State University. “Breathe, Don’t Vent: Turning Down the Heat Is Key to Managing Anger” (news release on Kjærvik S, Bushman BJ, “A Meta-Analytic Review of Anger Management Activities That Increase or Decrease Arousal: What Fuels or Douses Rage?” Clinical Psychology Review, 2024). Ohio State News, March 18, 2024. news.osu.edu
3. Gross JJ, John OP. “Individual Differences in Two Emotion Regulation Processes: Implications for Affect, Relationships, and Well-Being.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2003;85(2):348–362 (University of Victoria course copy). onlineacademiccommunity.uvic.ca
4. Webb TL, Miles E, Sheeran P. “Dealing With Feeling: A Meta-Analysis of the Effectiveness of Strategies Derived From the Process Model of Emotion Regulation.” Psychological Bulletin, 2012;138(4):775–808 (author copy). pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
5. Jones JL, Isaacowitz DM, Ayduk Ö. “Conceal and Don’t Feel as Much? Experiential Effects of Expressive Suppression.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, published online November 6, 2024 (eScholarship copy). escholarship.org
6. Lieberman MD, Eisenberger NI, Crockett MJ, et al. “Putting Feelings Into Words: Affect Labeling Disrupts Amygdala Activity in Response to Affective Stimuli.” Psychological Science, 2007;18(5):421–428 (UCLA lab copy). sites.lifesci.ucla.edu
7. Association for Psychological Science. “‘That Giant Tarantula Is Terrifying, but I’ll Touch It’: Expressing Your Emotions Can Reduce Fear” (news release on Kircanski K, Lieberman MD, Craske MG, Psychological Science, 2012). APS, September 5, 2012. psychologicalscience.org
8. Nolen-Hoeksema S, Wisco BE, Lyubomirsky S. “Rethinking Rumination.” Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2008;3(5):400–424 (eScholarship record). escholarship.org
9. Webb TL, Schweiger Gallo I, Miles E, Gollwitzer PM, Sheeran P. “Effective Regulation of Affect: An Action Control Perspective on Emotion Regulation.” European Review of Social Psychology, 2012;23(1):143–186 (University of Konstanz copy). socmot.uni-konstanz.de
10. National Institute of Mental Health. “I’m So Stressed Out! Fact Sheet.” NIH Publication No. 20-MH-8125. nimh.nih.gov
11. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Managing Difficult Emotions.” CDC, October 1, 2024. cdc.gov
12. National Institute of Mental Health. “Psychotherapies.” NIH, last reviewed February 2024. nimh.nih.gov
13. MedlinePlus. “Stress in Childhood.” Medical Encyclopedia, National Library of Medicine, reviewed April 18, 2026. medlineplus.gov
14. National Institute of Mental Health. “Children and Mental Health: Is This Just a Stage?” NIH Publication No. 24-MH-8085, revised 2024. nimh.nih.gov
15. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Minneapolis VA Health Care System. “Evidence Based Treatments.” VA, last updated March 3, 2025. va.gov