What Cools Your Anger?
Anger is a tricky emotion. It can fire us up to stand our ground, right a wrong, or push for change. But it can also take over, leaving us drained, regretful, or stuck in a cycle of resentment.
In one entry from her Journal of a Solitude, published in 1973, poet and writer May Sarton wrote:
The fierce tension in me, when it is properly channeled, creates the good tension for work. But when it becomes unbalanced I am destructive. How to isolate that good tension is my problem these days. Or, put in another way, how to turn the heat down fast enough so the soup won’t boil over!
As Sarton points out, knowing how to turn the heat down—managing anger in the moment—is key to avoiding its destructive side. Sure, in some situations, like when an athlete needs that extra burst of drive, anger can be channeled and even used creatively, as she says. It can also be harnessed by activists fighting for justice. But more often than not, it’s when anger boils over that things go awry.
So, what actually works when it comes to managing anger, especially the kind that’s more fleeting—like when you’re cut off in traffic, your child refuses to go to bed (again), or you’re left waiting endlessly for food when you’re starving?
A recent meta-analysis of 154 studies examined the effectiveness of different anger management strategies. While the results aren’t exactly shocking—especially if you're familiar with research on the topic—they do offer a clear, research-backed summary of what tends to work best.
Researchers examined two broad categories of anger management interventions:
Arousal-decreasing activities: These techniques aim to calm both the mind and body, such as deep breathing exercises, progressive muscle relaxation, or mindfulness practices.
Arousal-increasing activities: These involve engaging or amplifying energy, like punching a bag, intense exercise, or venting anger through yelling or hitting objects.
The goal was to identify whether these activities increased or decreased anger, aggression, or rage.
Here are the findings that stood out:
Calming the storm
It turns out that arousal-decreasing activities are far more effective at reducing anger, hostility, and aggression. Deep breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, and present moment awareness (or mindful attention) all showed significant benefits.
By calming both your body and mind in the moment, these techniques reduce physiological arousal, making it easier to regulate anger.
The findings applied across certain demographics: different genders, races, ages, and cultures.
Venting might not decrease anger
On the flip side, arousal-increasing activities, like punching a bag, engaging in intense exercise, or venting didn’t reduce anger.
Contrary to the common advice to "let it all out" by venting through physical aggression (e.g., breaking things), there is no evidence that such activities help reduce anger. In fact, rather than cooling the anger, you might end up stoking the fire.
While venting doesn’t seem to help, some physical activities show mixed effects. For example, playing ball sports or aerobic exercises showed slight reductions in anger. But highly competitive or intense physical activities, such as stair climbing or jogging, sometimes amplified anger due to the heightened arousal involved.
The bottom line
If your goal is to calm down, forget about "letting it all out" through aggressive venting. Instead, use techniques that help you pause and slow down. Pairing calming strategies with cognitive reframing—shifting how you interpret a situation—can be even more effective.
This research challenges some of the most popular ideas about anger expression—especially the notion that we need to “get it out” through aggressive outlets. The rise of “anger rooms,” like The Break Room in Atlanta, reflects this belief: people pay to smash objects with bats or sledgehammers, hoping for catharsis. But while this might feel satisfying in the moment, research suggests it can actually reinforce aggressive tendencies rather than resolve anger.
The research reminded me of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh’s conversation on the On Being podcast with Krista Tippett. His words on anger echo the research’s key finding: pausing and reflecting on our anger is essential to preventing it from escalating into destructive behaviour:
We have to remain human in order to be able to understand and to be compassionate. You have the right to be angry, but you don’t have the right not to practice in order to transform your anger… When you notice that anger is coming up in you, you have to practice mindful breathing in order to generate the energy of mindfulness, in order to recognize your anger and embrace it tenderly so that you can bring relief into you and not to act and to say things… that can be destructive. And doing so, you can look deeply into the nature of your anger and know where it has come from.
One thing to bear in mind is that not all anger is the same. Momentary frustration differs from anger rooted in deeper emotional wounds. In therapy, I often see anger masking grief, shame, or fear of abandonment. In these cases, managing anger isn’t just about calming down—it’s about uncovering what lies beneath. It requires exploring and working through other emotions.