Oy. Further evidence I made bad decisions in my 20s. I was a big fan of the Henry Rollins school of ‘directed rage’. (Use the anger as energy and direct it into good activities) Turns out he was a...
Oy. Further evidence I made bad decisions in my 20s. I was a big fan of the Henry Rollins school of ‘directed rage’. (Use the anger as energy and direct it into good activities) Turns out he was a hermit with untreated PTSD. Still love the guy, and you work with what you’ve got and all- but I can confirm that is a suboptimal long-term strategy for life.
I thought it was interesting that they suggested activities that were fun. I wonder what those might be. This article surprised me. I would have thought that going for a run when angry would be a...
I thought it was interesting that they suggested activities that were fun. I wonder what those might be.
This article surprised me. I would have thought that going for a run when angry would be a good idea.
When i go for a run, my state often already goes from bored to a "ready to be angry at anything". I wouldn't even think about going already angry, that's just a waste of a good run spent on...
When i go for a run, my state often already goes from bored to a "ready to be angry at anything". I wouldn't even think about going already angry, that's just a waste of a good run spent on thinking bad stuff.
Interestingly I'm the opposite. I got into distance running to decompress after having to commute in particularly bad traffic for a few years. I'd get home fuming, immediately head to the local...
Interestingly I'm the opposite. I got into distance running to decompress after having to commute in particularly bad traffic for a few years. I'd get home fuming, immediately head to the local track and show up home again after an hour or so in the best mood. I think the endorphins are a real mood stabilizer for me.
That's interesting. I've found a run to be the best treatment for frustration and ruminating thoughts. The first half of the run will involve me continuing to ruminate, but gradually that feeling...
That's interesting. I've found a run to be the best treatment for frustration and ruminating thoughts. The first half of the run will involve me continuing to ruminate, but gradually that feeling will lessen and I'll start thinking about other things. Sometimes it's because I've thought of what the best course of action is and decided on that path. At other times, whatever problem I'm dealing with just feels insignificant once I'm outside and moving around. By the end of the run, I'll probably still have the frustrating topic in my mind somewhere, but often it feels like it's "been dealt with" for now. Which is relieving.
Maybe that kind of frustration is different from the anger that you're talking about though. I'm kind of confused by the article, because I do find running to be a calming activity. Maybe not while I'm literally running, but afterwards I'm always calmer than before.
Why do you get angry when running? Is it all the other people out there that frustrate you when you're running? Or do you dislike running so much that it gets you angry? When I run outdoors in my...
Why do you get angry when running? Is it all the other people out there that frustrate you when you're running? Or do you dislike running so much that it gets you angry?
When I run outdoors in my neighborhood, I occasionally get angry because there is always driver who doesn't stop at stop signs, there is always a neighbor who decided to block the sidewalk while they wash their car, there is always another runner/jogger who thinks running in the middle of the road is a good idea, things like that get me angry so now I usually only run outdoors at parks, otherwise it's just gym for me to run on the treadmill.
Emphasis on the "ready to be angry". I am truly enjoying myself when i'm running but i'm also hyper like a kid on a sugar-high. Usually i do get angry at drivers that seem to think that after dark...
Emphasis on the "ready to be angry". I am truly enjoying myself when i'm running but i'm also hyper like a kid on a sugar-high.
Usually i do get angry at drivers that seem to think that after dark there is no need to stop for pedestrians. If i was just on a walk i would be more like "yeah, they be like that" and forget about the incident.
It makes sense...when my toddler is having a tantrum I don't hand them a soccer ball... they take a time-out. Which ironically boils down to calming and .... venting. Because: In my head, this...
It makes sense...when my toddler is having a tantrum I don't hand them a soccer ball... they take a time-out.
Which ironically boils down to calming and .... venting. Because:
Venting, however, often goes beyond reflection into rumination
In my head, this quote more or less disproves the article title. I guess you could say "Ranting with no introspection or discussion doesn't reduce anger," or maybe "Venting does not reduce acute symptoms of anger." But reflecting and rumination are kind of critical tools when learning how to manage your anger outside of that one particular instance.
Venting (and reflection/rumination) are about treating the cause, not the symptom, IMHO.
Once again, Daniel Tiger's sage advice on how to treat the symptom holds:
When you feel so mad, that you want to ROAR
Take a deep breath, and count to 4
Venting isn't reflecting through. When someone is venting, they're just reliving whatever made them angry in the first place, assigning external blame, and just raging that the world is unfair. It...
Venting isn't reflecting through. When someone is venting, they're just reliving whatever made them angry in the first place, assigning external blame, and just raging that the world is unfair. It almost by definition is a thought pattern that encourages helplessness. The core theme of a vent session is that the world is unfair, there's nothing you personally can do to fix it, and thus your anger is the only valid response.
Reflection, on the other hand, implies something more productive. It involves examining your response to a situationn and evaluating what you could have done differently to not feel that way.
It makes sense that one stokes anger, while the other reduces it.
Rumination in particular is used to describe pathological thinking that shows up in depression. My take is that anger is a very helpful emotion when you get mad because something isn’t right and...
Rumination in particular is used to describe pathological thinking that shows up in depression.
My take is that anger is a very helpful emotion when you get mad because something isn’t right and you do can do something about it. But the value of, say, me thinking repetitively about how the whole school from the bullies to the bystandards to the teachers, the principal, the school board, etc. and drawing a line to everything that went wrong in my life since (not everything) is limited.
I also think that you get better at anything you do a lot and you can certainly get better at expressing your anger and being angry, but what good does that do you?
The same kind of good that being able to express your sadness is. Emotional awareness in men is in an especially depressing state. As I teach my children. It's normal and healthy to be angry...
The same kind of good that being able to express your sadness is.
Emotional awareness in men is in an especially depressing state.
As I teach my children. It's normal and healthy to be angry sometimes. It's not ok to let that anger consume you and dictate your behavior.
When I was going through my midlife crisis I was facing intense feelings of anger and made the discovery I could control these with “sadness flooding” which might be going to the war memorial and...
When I was going through my midlife crisis I was facing intense feelings of anger and made the discovery I could control these with “sadness flooding” which might be going to the war memorial and reading the names or something like that.
I couldn’t find any references to this technique in Western psychological literature but I did find out it was something people knew about in China hundreds of years ago.
For that matter I discovered that men get better results with women using sadness as opposed to anger.
I'm going to guess at this, that women would become afraid and withdrawn if their man expressed anger with something they'd done rather than if he had expressed sadness and vulnerability, which...
I'm going to guess at this, that women would become afraid and withdrawn if their man expressed anger with something they'd done rather than if he had expressed sadness and vulnerability, which would have produced a more understanding and vulnerable response from the woman.
Ah okay, this explanation does make some sense to me, thanks, I was genuinely a bit baffled when I read the comment earlier so this at least points me in the right direction to think about this...
Ah okay, this explanation does make some sense to me, thanks, I was genuinely a bit baffled when I read the comment earlier so this at least points me in the right direction to think about this comment. I do hope most men in these comments are motivated to improve their emotional health for their own sake rather than to improve their interactions with women, though.
No. I chewed on that statement for longer than you imagine. It is deliberately vague and precise simultaneously and almost certainly true no matter how you interpret it. I wouldn’t want to take...
No. I chewed on that statement for longer than you imagine. It is deliberately vague and precise simultaneously and almost certainly true no matter how you interpret it. I wouldn’t want to take that away from anybody.
Venting when angry seems sensible. Conventional wisdom suggests expressing anger can help us quell it, like releasing steam from a pressure cooker.
But this common metaphor is misleading, according to a new meta-analytic review. Researchers at Ohio State University analyzed 154 studies on anger, finding little evidence that venting helps. In some cases, it could increase anger.
...
Rather than trying to vent anger, the researchers recommend undermining it by turning down the heat. Calming tactics already proven to ease stress may also rob anger of physiological fuel.
...
Their study examined both arousal-increasing and arousal-reducing activities, from boxing, cycling, and jogging to deep breathing, meditating, and yoga.
Calming activities reduced anger in the lab and the field, they found, and across other variables like methods of instruction or participant demographics. Effective arousal-reducing activities included slow-flow yoga, mindfulness, progressive muscle relaxation, diaphragmatic breathing, and taking a timeout.
When I'm angry and I vent to someone, I usually don't do it because I want the anger to go away. I'm pretty good at controlling my emotions, and if I wanted to calm down, I could've just done that...
When I'm angry and I vent to someone, I usually don't do it because I want the anger to go away. I'm pretty good at controlling my emotions, and if I wanted to calm down, I could've just done that myself. I usually vent for the opposite reason - I want to feel the anger, completely live through it, fully understand what I'm angry about and how to put it to words, have someone else validate my feelings. Same thing applies to other emotions (eg. sadness) and other activities (screaming, punching a pillow, etc.) I often read those articles about how those actions don't calm you down, and yeah, they don't, but is "calming down" really what people are trying to achieve when doing those things?
Yeah this is my biggest hangup with the framing of this article. I don't vent to calm down, I vent to have my anger validated by whoever I'm venting to. While I can understand that this is not...
Yeah this is my biggest hangup with the framing of this article. I don't vent to calm down, I vent to have my anger validated by whoever I'm venting to. While I can understand that this is not always productive and can be unhealthy under some circumstances, anger isn't inherently wrong to feel. It's good to know not to vent if I want to calm down, but calming down immediately doesn't need to always be the goal when one feels angry. In some contexts it can be important to calm down, but in others it absolutely isn't. Sometimes it's more important to validate one's emotions than it is to quash them.
Exactly. It's not even an inherently painful emotion - basically no emotions are. Emotional pain is a separate thing that just so happens to sometime come "bundled" with your emotions, and you can...
anger isn't inherently wrong to feel
Exactly. It's not even an inherently painful emotion - basically no emotions are. Emotional pain is a separate thing that just so happens to sometime come "bundled" with your emotions, and you can even learn to control your emotional pain separately from emotions themselves.
I can enjoy anger, sadness, or anything else without feeling bad, and I can want to continue feeling the same way without wanting to calm down.
This is the case for me as well. I am not prone to anger (when I am deeply unhappy, I default to sadness instead), but anger is sometimes a very useful emotion to have (it motivates action, unlike...
When I'm angry and I vent to someone, I usually don't do it because I want the anger to go away. I'm pretty good at controlling my emotions, and if I wanted to calm down, I could've just done that myself.
This is the case for me as well. I am not prone to anger (when I am deeply unhappy, I default to sadness instead), but anger is sometimes a very useful emotion to have (it motivates action, unlike sadness which saps my willpower), so I have occasionally used venting and a few other similar techniques to deliberately increase my agitation level. I do not naturally reach the degree of anger required to make the hard decision to, say, leave a bad relationship or a bad job.
Unfortunately, I think some people can tell that I am easygoing and try to take advantage of that. They are terribly surprised when, seemingly out of nowhere, I react to them with rage (when I've previously only ever been patient and accommodating, however egregious their impositions) and that I intend to never make peace with them, not even over years or decades. What they don't realize is that my rage is meticulously groomed over a period of weeks or months; it is not some temporary departure from rationality.
Thanks for sharing, this was a good read and something I needed to hear. As I have gotten older and accumulated more responsibilities (as many of us do), I realize that I often fall into traps of...
Thanks for sharing, this was a good read and something I needed to hear.
As I have gotten older and accumulated more responsibilities (as many of us do), I realize that I often fall into traps of being irritated/angry on a semi-regular basis, far more than when I was younger. And I've found myself falling into patterns of raging/venting to my family and friends (something that provides temporarily relief, but I know isn't actually good for me or others).
And each time I realize I'm in one of those traps, the only thing that actually kicks off my recovery is some type of strenuous physical activity.
Physical activity puts my mind into a more "docile" state where I can easily pinpoint the things that are causing me distress so that I can then find ways to address them.
This is interesting and makes sense to me. Like others have mentioned, venting can cause one to "relive" the experience they are venting about. The anger that comes with venting, usually expressed...
It's really a battle because angry people want to vent, but our research shows that any good feeling we get from venting actually reinforces aggression.
This is interesting and makes sense to me. Like others have mentioned, venting can cause one to "relive" the experience they are venting about. The anger that comes with venting, usually expressed in the form of yelling/shouting/loud talking/etc. might feel good when combined with the act of someone listening to the person venting, and then maybe the mind links the aggressive behaviors displayed during the vent session as "good."
This is good to keep in mind. I tend to want to vent, though I try to avoid it because I kind of figured it wasn't healthy anyway (mainly because of the fact another person is having to be subjected to venting). It also seems like the issue is rumination that can occur with venting, as opposed to reflection (which is healthy). I wonder, does writing about the situation in a personal journal count as "venting"? Or is that a calming activity?
@cfabbro, anticlickbait-title-duty if you don't mind? Calming Activities are recommended over venting
@cfabbro, anticlickbait-title-duty if you don't mind? Physical Exercise is Calming Activities are recommended over venting as mentioned first by the article
Oy. Further evidence I made bad decisions in my 20s. I was a big fan of the Henry Rollins school of ‘directed rage’. (Use the anger as energy and direct it into good activities) Turns out he was a hermit with untreated PTSD. Still love the guy, and you work with what you’ve got and all- but I can confirm that is a suboptimal long-term strategy for life.
You can only work with the information you have at the time.
I thought it was interesting that they suggested activities that were fun. I wonder what those might be.
This article surprised me. I would have thought that going for a run when angry would be a good idea.
When i go for a run, my state often already goes from bored to a "ready to be angry at anything". I wouldn't even think about going already angry, that's just a waste of a good run spent on thinking bad stuff.
Interestingly I'm the opposite. I got into distance running to decompress after having to commute in particularly bad traffic for a few years. I'd get home fuming, immediately head to the local track and show up home again after an hour or so in the best mood. I think the endorphins are a real mood stabilizer for me.
That's interesting. I've found a run to be the best treatment for frustration and ruminating thoughts. The first half of the run will involve me continuing to ruminate, but gradually that feeling will lessen and I'll start thinking about other things. Sometimes it's because I've thought of what the best course of action is and decided on that path. At other times, whatever problem I'm dealing with just feels insignificant once I'm outside and moving around. By the end of the run, I'll probably still have the frustrating topic in my mind somewhere, but often it feels like it's "been dealt with" for now. Which is relieving.
Maybe that kind of frustration is different from the anger that you're talking about though. I'm kind of confused by the article, because I do find running to be a calming activity. Maybe not while I'm literally running, but afterwards I'm always calmer than before.
Why do you get angry when running? Is it all the other people out there that frustrate you when you're running? Or do you dislike running so much that it gets you angry?
When I run outdoors in my neighborhood, I occasionally get angry because there is always driver who doesn't stop at stop signs, there is always a neighbor who decided to block the sidewalk while they wash their car, there is always another runner/jogger who thinks running in the middle of the road is a good idea, things like that get me angry so now I usually only run outdoors at parks, otherwise it's just gym for me to run on the treadmill.
Emphasis on the "ready to be angry". I am truly enjoying myself when i'm running but i'm also hyper like a kid on a sugar-high.
Usually i do get angry at drivers that seem to think that after dark there is no need to stop for pedestrians. If i was just on a walk i would be more like "yeah, they be like that" and forget about the incident.
It makes sense...when my toddler is having a tantrum I don't hand them a soccer ball... they take a time-out.
Which ironically boils down to calming and .... venting. Because:
In my head, this quote more or less disproves the article title. I guess you could say "Ranting with no introspection or discussion doesn't reduce anger," or maybe "Venting does not reduce acute symptoms of anger." But reflecting and rumination are kind of critical tools when learning how to manage your anger outside of that one particular instance.
Venting (and reflection/rumination) are about treating the cause, not the symptom, IMHO.
Once again, Daniel Tiger's sage advice on how to treat the symptom holds:
Venting isn't reflecting through. When someone is venting, they're just reliving whatever made them angry in the first place, assigning external blame, and just raging that the world is unfair. It almost by definition is a thought pattern that encourages helplessness. The core theme of a vent session is that the world is unfair, there's nothing you personally can do to fix it, and thus your anger is the only valid response.
Reflection, on the other hand, implies something more productive. It involves examining your response to a situationn and evaluating what you could have done differently to not feel that way.
It makes sense that one stokes anger, while the other reduces it.
Rumination in particular is used to describe pathological thinking that shows up in depression.
My take is that anger is a very helpful emotion when you get mad because something isn’t right and you do can do something about it. But the value of, say, me thinking repetitively about how the whole school from the bullies to the bystandards to the teachers, the principal, the school board, etc. and drawing a line to everything that went wrong in my life since (not everything) is limited.
I also think that you get better at anything you do a lot and you can certainly get better at expressing your anger and being angry, but what good does that do you?
The same kind of good that being able to express your sadness is.
Emotional awareness in men is in an especially depressing state.
As I teach my children. It's normal and healthy to be angry sometimes. It's not ok to let that anger consume you and dictate your behavior.
When I was going through my midlife crisis I was facing intense feelings of anger and made the discovery I could control these with “sadness flooding” which might be going to the war memorial and reading the names or something like that.
I couldn’t find any references to this technique in Western psychological literature but I did find out it was something people knew about in China hundreds of years ago.
For that matter I discovered that men get better results with women using sadness as opposed to anger.
Could you elaborate on what you mean by "better results with women" here?
I'm going to guess at this, that women would become afraid and withdrawn if their man expressed anger with something they'd done rather than if he had expressed sadness and vulnerability, which would have produced a more understanding and vulnerable response from the woman.
Ah okay, this explanation does make some sense to me, thanks, I was genuinely a bit baffled when I read the comment earlier so this at least points me in the right direction to think about this comment. I do hope most men in these comments are motivated to improve their emotional health for their own sake rather than to improve their interactions with women, though.
No. I chewed on that statement for longer than you imagine. It is deliberately vague and precise simultaneously and almost certainly true no matter how you interpret it. I wouldn’t want to take that away from anybody.
When I'm angry and I vent to someone, I usually don't do it because I want the anger to go away. I'm pretty good at controlling my emotions, and if I wanted to calm down, I could've just done that myself. I usually vent for the opposite reason - I want to feel the anger, completely live through it, fully understand what I'm angry about and how to put it to words, have someone else validate my feelings. Same thing applies to other emotions (eg. sadness) and other activities (screaming, punching a pillow, etc.) I often read those articles about how those actions don't calm you down, and yeah, they don't, but is "calming down" really what people are trying to achieve when doing those things?
Yeah this is my biggest hangup with the framing of this article. I don't vent to calm down, I vent to have my anger validated by whoever I'm venting to. While I can understand that this is not always productive and can be unhealthy under some circumstances, anger isn't inherently wrong to feel. It's good to know not to vent if I want to calm down, but calming down immediately doesn't need to always be the goal when one feels angry. In some contexts it can be important to calm down, but in others it absolutely isn't. Sometimes it's more important to validate one's emotions than it is to quash them.
Exactly. It's not even an inherently painful emotion - basically no emotions are. Emotional pain is a separate thing that just so happens to sometime come "bundled" with your emotions, and you can even learn to control your emotional pain separately from emotions themselves.
I can enjoy anger, sadness, or anything else without feeling bad, and I can want to continue feeling the same way without wanting to calm down.
This is the case for me as well. I am not prone to anger (when I am deeply unhappy, I default to sadness instead), but anger is sometimes a very useful emotion to have (it motivates action, unlike sadness which saps my willpower), so I have occasionally used venting and a few other similar techniques to deliberately increase my agitation level. I do not naturally reach the degree of anger required to make the hard decision to, say, leave a bad relationship or a bad job.
Unfortunately, I think some people can tell that I am easygoing and try to take advantage of that. They are terribly surprised when, seemingly out of nowhere, I react to them with rage (when I've previously only ever been patient and accommodating, however egregious their impositions) and that I intend to never make peace with them, not even over years or decades. What they don't realize is that my rage is meticulously groomed over a period of weeks or months; it is not some temporary departure from rationality.
Thanks for sharing, this was a good read and something I needed to hear.
As I have gotten older and accumulated more responsibilities (as many of us do), I realize that I often fall into traps of being irritated/angry on a semi-regular basis, far more than when I was younger. And I've found myself falling into patterns of raging/venting to my family and friends (something that provides temporarily relief, but I know isn't actually good for me or others).
And each time I realize I'm in one of those traps, the only thing that actually kicks off my recovery is some type of strenuous physical activity.
Physical activity puts my mind into a more "docile" state where I can easily pinpoint the things that are causing me distress so that I can then find ways to address them.
This is interesting and makes sense to me. Like others have mentioned, venting can cause one to "relive" the experience they are venting about. The anger that comes with venting, usually expressed in the form of yelling/shouting/loud talking/etc. might feel good when combined with the act of someone listening to the person venting, and then maybe the mind links the aggressive behaviors displayed during the vent session as "good."
This is good to keep in mind. I tend to want to vent, though I try to avoid it because I kind of figured it wasn't healthy anyway (mainly because of the fact another person is having to be subjected to venting). It also seems like the issue is rumination that can occur with venting, as opposed to reflection (which is healthy). I wonder, does writing about the situation in a personal journal count as "venting"? Or is that a calming activity?
@cfabbro, anticlickbait-title-duty if you don't mind?
Physical Exercise isCalming Activities are recommended over ventingas mentioned first by the articleThey claim that “calming activities” work but not most exercise.
Ah thanks - apologies I'd just skimmed it for anti-clickbait purposes and they said excersize first iirc
Cold shower is where it's at
Done. I went with @skybrian's quoted exact wording for extra clarity though.