Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Letting it out safely
Punching something to get the anger out is the piece of grief advice that gets argued over most, and the honest answer is that hitting rarely leaves a person calmer.
Plenty of good people will tell you a bag is better than a wall or a face, and there is something in that. What has not held up is the older idea that anger drains away through your fists. Going hard at a pillow while replaying what happened tends to keep the whole thing hot. If the anger needs to move, and it usually does, pick something that moves your body without practising a strike.
Qur’an and Sunnah
'An evil word is like a rotten tree, uprooted from the surface of the earth, with no power to endure' (Quran 14:26). What is swung in anger leaves little behind it, whether the target is a person or a bag.
وَمَثَلُ كَلِمَةٍ خَبِيثَةࣲ كَشَجَرَةٍ خَبِيثَةٍ ٱجۡتُثَّتۡ مِن فَوۡقِ ٱلۡأَرۡضِ مَا لَهَا مِن قَرَارࣲ
but an evil word is like a rotten tree, uprooted from the surface of the earth, with no power to endure
Qur’an 14:26read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Laboratory experiments on anger found that recalling an anger-provoking event was not itself the problem. Turning it over and over prolonged the anger and raised blood pressure, while reappraising the same memory brought both down. These were short laboratory tasks rather than sessions with a punching bag, so the parallel is partial. It does sit badly with the idea that going at something forcefully will discharge the feeling.
Ray RD, Wilhelm FH, Gross JJ. (2008). All in the mind's eye? Anger rumination and reappraisal.. Journal of personality and social psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Rehearsing the blow keeps you inside the fight instead of letting you out of it.
When not to
If your anger frightens you, or you have hurt someone or come close to it, that is a moment for proper help rather than a technique you try alone.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Give the anger a room rather than a target. Music up loud, walk fast, dance badly, shake your arms out until something in you settles.
Write the exact thing you are furious about on a paper plate, tape it to the wall, and throw wet cotton balls at it. It sounds childish, and it does more than swinging at nothing.
There is motion sitting inside the word emotion. Big feelings come out through the body, so if you cannot keep still while you are grieving, that is the feeling moving rather than something going wrong with you.