"If I hold it in, it'll make me ill"

If the outburst isn't a release valve, you might expect people to give it up happily. Mostly they don't, and one reason is the alternative they picture. They see themselves standing there with a fixed smile, saying "it's fine" through their teeth, while everything they haven't said goes sour inside them. They've heard that bottled-up anger causes ulcers, or heart trouble, or a far bigger explosion later on. Given that choice, shouting looks like the healthier option.

The fear has something real in it. Putting a lid on a feeling while it's still running at full strength is hard work, and the work shows up in the body. James Gross, a psychologist at Stanford, ran an experiment on this in the 1990s. He showed people an unpleasant film. Some were told to hide any sign of what they felt. Others were told to think about the film in a way that made it less upsetting, which researchers call reappraisal. Both groups looked calm from the outside. The group that only hid their reaction felt just as bad as before, and their bodies were more worked up than those of people who'd simply watched. The group that changed how they thought about the film felt less to begin with.

So you're right to distrust the fixed smile. Anyone who has said "I'm fine" in that particular voice knows it fools nobody and settles nothing.

The mistake is thinking those are the only two options. Blow up or clamp down. Both of them deal with the heat and the point as a single package. When you blow up, you deliver the package at full heat. When you clamp down, you hold on to the package, still hot, and try not to let it show.

There's a third option, and the rest of the book is built on it. You separate the two. You let the heat fall, which it does within minutes when you stop feeding it. You keep the point. Then you decide what to do with the point, and if it's still worth raising, you raise it in a normal voice with the right person. Nothing has been bottled. The complaint gets made. It gets made a little later, by a version of you who can think.

People who clamp down often find this hard to believe, because in their experience the anger doesn't fade. It sits there for days. That's true, and it's worth seeing why. The silent sufferer is rarely letting anything go. They're replaying the offence in their head, polishing what they should have said and collecting further evidence. In Bushman's punching bag study, the group who kept thinking about the person who'd insulted them stayed angriest. Going over and over a grievance, which psychologists call rumination, is one of the most dependable ways to keep anger alive. The feeling lasts for days because it's being fed several times an hour.

This is why I count the long cold silence as a form of the same habit. If you're the reader who never shouts, and who goes quiet and distant for three days until the other person works out what they did, most of this book applies to you with small adjustments. The silence is an outburst in slow motion. It gives the same sense of power, and it's the same failure to say what's wrong. It also costs you more time.

As for the big explosion that's said to follow a long spell of holding it in, I agree that it happens. My reading is that it comes from unsaid points piling up, and not from stored-up heat. You let forty small things pass without a word, each one goes into the file, and one day the file comes out all at once over a teaspoon left in the sink. The other person is baffled, because from where they stand you've gone berserk about a teaspoon. Shouting more often won't cure that. Saying the small things calmly at the time will, because it keeps the file thin.

One caution about health claims in general. You'll find articles saying that expressing anger is bad for your heart, and others saying that holding it in is bad for your heart. The research is mixed, and I'm not going to pick a frightening statistic to push you in either direction. You don't need one. The argument here depends only on something you can observe in yourself, which is that neither blowing up nor clamping down gets your point heard, and both leave you feeling bad.

So the choice was never between exploding and swallowing it.