Is venting anger healthy?

What the experiments found

Bushman, Baumeister and Stack (1999) gave participants a message claiming that hitting a punching bag relieves anger, a message claiming the opposite, or a neutral one, then provoked them. Those who had read the pro-catharsis message were more inclined to choose the bag, and those who vented were subsequently more aggressive toward the provocateur, not less. Believing in catharsis increased the wish to vent without reducing later aggression.

Bushman (2002) compared three responses to a provocation: hitting a bag while thinking about the person who caused the anger, hitting a bag while thinking about fitness, and sitting quietly. The first group reported the most anger and behaved most aggressively; the group that did nothing behaved least aggressively. The proposed mechanism is rehearsal. Exertion raises arousal, and if attention stays on the grievance, that arousal is experienced as anger.

What the meta-analysis adds

Single experiments have particular procedures, so Kjærvik and Bushman (2024) asked the same question across the literature: 154 studies, 184 independent samples, 10,189 participants, sorted by whether an anger-management activity raises or lowers physiological arousal.

Arousal-raising activities, including hitting a bag, jogging and cycling, showed no reduction in anger and aggression overall (g = -0.02, 95% interval -0.13 to 0.09), and those studies were heterogeneous. Arousal-lowering activities, such as slow breathing, relaxation and mindfulness, reduced anger and aggression (g = -0.63, 95% interval -0.82 to -0.43), and the result held across students and non-students, offenders and non-offenders, people with and without intellectual disabilities, and group, individual, digital, laboratory and field formats.

A null pooled average is not evidence of harm, and it concerns anger and aggression only, not fitness, mood or social connection, where exercise has other documented benefits.

Rehearsing versus reinterpreting

The problem is less the expression than what attention does during it. Ray and colleagues (2008) found that, relative to reappraisal, ruminating on an anger-provoking event produced a stronger experience of anger, more cognitive perseveration and greater sympathetic activation. Denson (2013) describes angry rumination as a risk factor for aggression that temporarily reduces self-control. Both are short-term laboratory findings, and the self-control account comes from a theoretical model rather than a direct test.

Read together with the meta-analysis, the picture is consistent: what keeps anger active is going over the provocation, and venting is a way of going over it with the body involved.

When anger is more than a bad evening

None of the above is a treatment. For adults whose anger is established by standardised measures, a meta-analysis of 23 controlled studies found medium to large treatment effects, with cognitive therapies supported for driving anger, suppressed anger and trait anger, and relaxation for state anger (Del Vecchio & O’Leary, 2004). Those studies run to 2002 and included few treatment-seeking participants, and they describe professional treatment rather than self-help.

If anger is frequent, intense, or is damaging relationships, work or safety, that is a reason to talk to a clinician rather than to work through a list.