Somewhere in an Ohio State laboratory, a man punched a hole in the wall. His essay had just been savaged by a stranger, and in response he’d been handed a punching bag and told to picture that stranger’s face while he swung. He was, in theory, getting it out of his system.
The wall says otherwise.
That detail sits in a footnote of Brad Bushman’s 2002 experiment in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, which recruited 600 students, arranged for a fake peer to trash their writing, then split them three ways. One group hit the bag while stewing on the insult. Another hit it while thinking about getting fit. The third sat quietly and did nothing at all. Everybody then got a chance to blast their critic with loud noise. The stewers came out the angriest and the most aggressive of the three. The people who sat still came out calmest.
One experiment proves very little on its own. So consider what happened when somebody counted all of them.
Where 154 studies landed
“There’s not a shred of scientific evidence to support catharsis theory,” Bushman said, in comments released by Ohio State News. In 2024, he and Sophie Kjaervik pooled 154 studies covering 10,189 participants and published the lot in Clinical Psychology Review. Their sorting logic was simple. Anger has a physical component (racing heart, clenched jaw, adrenaline) and a mental one (the story you tell yourself about the person who wronged you). Treatments can target either. Cognitive therapy goes after the story, and it works. Nobody had properly audited the other half.
So they split every intervention in the literature into two piles: things that crank your body up, like hitting a bag, cycling, swimming, and things that wind it down, like breathing exercises, meditation, progressive muscle relaxation, slow flow yoga. The winding-down pile reduced anger and aggression with a moderate to large effect that survived their sensitivity checks. The cranking-up pile did almost nothing on average, and parts of it backfired.
Jogging was the worst offender.
That’s a genuinely annoying result if you’re the sort of person who has ever laced up shoes after a bad meeting. Running is excellent for your heart. Per the Ohio State team, it is a poor tool for your temper, because it pushes arousal up rather than down. Curiously, ball sports and school PE classes went the other way and lowered anger, which the researchers put down to the element of play. Exertion with a game attached seems to do something exertion alone does not.
What the winding-down pile has going for it
Slow breathing is the least glamorous intervention imaginable, and it has a decent physiological story behind it. A systematic review in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience concluded that deliberately slowing the breath shifts the autonomic nervous system toward the parasympathetic side, the branch in charge of rest instead of emergency, with measurable changes in heart rate variability and brain rhythms. Reported anger, anxiety and confusion drop along with it.
Kjaervik and Bushman found the calming techniques held up across a wide spread of people: students and non-students, offenders and non-offenders, people with and without intellectual disabilities. They also proved effective in group sessions, one-on-one instruction and through apps. Kjaervik pointed out that almost everything on the effective list is free or close to it, which is a rare thing to be able to say about a mental health result.
Meanwhile, the smashing industry
So why do rage rooms keep opening if the research says no? The first commercial version appears to have started in Tokyo during the Great Recession, a business called The Venting Place, built for workers with nowhere else to put their frustration. Hundreds have followed. Marcus Biddle, reporting for WHYY’s The Pulse, found operators in Philadelphia and New Jersey who say teachers are among their most frequent customers, some arriving after a bereavement or a redundancy.
Customers are adamant it helps. A woman who visited a rage room in Margate told BBC News it was the best therapy session she had had in thirty years. The couple who opened one in East Sussex did so after losing their daughter to cancer, and described it as a way to release the angst they were carrying.
I have no interest in telling those people they are wrong about their own afternoon. What the research disputes is narrower and more specific: whether the smashing is what did the work, and whether doing it repeatedly builds any capacity to handle the next provocation. Patrick Markey, a psychologist at Villanova University, told WHYY he would be wary of the format being sold as a therapeutic technique, on the grounds that anyone with real rage problems deserves something demonstrably effective, not something neutral or actively unhelpful. His Temple University colleague Michael McCloskey was gentler. He compared rage rooms to axe throwing or video games: fine as a diversion, unwise for anyone whose brakes already fail.
That distinction matters more than the studies get credit for. Feeling better and getting better are different outcomes, and venting reliably delivers the first while leaving the second untouched. Kjaervik has said she started this work specifically wanting to puncture the idea that expressing anger is the same as coping with it.
What strikes me, having spent a working life in rooms where someone was always about to lose it, is how badly we needed the hydraulic metaphor to be true. Pressure builds, you open a valve, the gauge drops. Tidy, mechanical, and it asks nothing of you except permission.
The evidence points somewhere less flattering, which is that the valve was never there and the only lever you actually have is boring. Breathe out longer than you breathe in; count to ten and mean it; go away for a bit. It is advice your grandmother would have given you for free, and after 154 studies, it is the advice that keeps winning.
Editor’s note: This article was updated on September 14, 2026, to align its headline and wording more closely with the evidence and sources.
