"I need to let it out"

Ask people why they blow up and the most common answer involves pressure. "It builds and builds, and eventually it has to come out." "Better out than in." "I just needed to get it off my chest." After the outburst they often report feeling better, lighter, as though something has drained away.

Almost everyone pictures anger this way. It's a fluid under pressure, like steam in a boiler, and if you don't release some, the vessel will burst. The language is full of it. We let off steam, we blow our tops, we simmer and boil over. Whole businesses exist on this idea. You can pay to stand in a room and smash plates with a bat, and people come out smiling.

If the picture were accurate, the outburst would be a kind of maintenance. Unpleasant for bystanders, but necessary, and you'd be right to fear giving it up.

So it's worth knowing that researchers have been testing the pressure picture for decades, and it has done badly.

The best-known experiment is by Brad Bushman, a researcher now at Ohio State University. He arranged for students to have an essay they'd written harshly criticised, supposedly by another student. One group then hit a punching bag while thinking about the person who'd criticised them, which is venting in its purest form. A second group hit the bag while thinking about getting fit. A third group sat quietly for a couple of minutes and did nothing. Afterwards everyone reported their mood and got a chance to blast their critic with loud noise. If the pressure picture were right, the venting group should have been the calmest. They were the angriest and the most aggressive. The people who'd done nothing at all came out best.

One study proves little, so here's the larger result. In 2024 Sophie Kjærvik and Bushman pulled together 154 studies of anger-reducing activities, with more than ten thousand participants between them. They sorted the activities by what they do to the body. Activities that lower arousal, such as slow breathing, relaxation, meditation and yoga, reduced anger across all sorts of people and settings. Activities that raise arousal, such as hitting a bag or going for a hard run, didn't reduce it on average, and some made it worse.

That pattern tells you what's wrong with the boiler picture. Anger isn't a stored substance. No tank of it sits inside you, filling up. It's a state your body gets into and then either keeps up or lets go of, and whether it keeps it up depends on what you do. Shouting, hitting things and rehearsing your grievance keep the body worked up and keep your mind on the target. You're practising being angry, and you get better at what you practise.

Now the fair objection. You have felt better after blowing up. That wasn't imagined.

I believe you. I'd only ask you to look at what the relief is made of. Partly it's exhaustion. A surge like that can't be kept up for long, and when it drops you feel the drop as calm. Partly it's the end of the build-up itself. The half hour of rising tension before an outburst is miserable, and the outburst ends it. You'd also feel the end of that tension if it had eased another way. Notice too how long the good feeling lasts. If your experience is like most people's, it's gone within minutes, and what replaces it is the kitchen scene from chapter 1. Relief from steam that's truly been released shouldn't turn into dread that quickly.

There's a second objection. "What about talking to a friend? Surely that's healthy." It can be, and it depends on which kind of talking. If you ring a friend to work out what happened, whether you've read it right, and what to do, that usually helps. If you ring them to tell the story again with the outrage turned up, and they say "he did what?" in all the right places, you'll put the phone down angrier than you picked it up. You can tell the difference by how your body feels at the end of the call.

The practical meaning is this. You can stop treating the outburst as something your health requires. It isn't a release valve. If anything it's a rehearsal. When the heat is on you, the things that help are the ones that slow the body down, and we'll get specific about those in chapter 10.