Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Letting it out safely
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.
Half the good of it is in the writing. Vague anger has to become a sentence before it can go on the plate, and reading that sentence back usually tells you something you had not quite known. The other half is that your body gets to act on it, aimed and physical, with nobody harmed and no blow practised. Children take to this quickly. Adults do too, once they are past how silly it feels.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Job names it exactly: 'Satan has afflicted me with weariness and suffering' (Quran 38:41). Being precise about what hurts is part of the expression, not a delay before it.
وَٱذۡكُرۡ عَبۡدَنَآ أَيُّوبَ إِذۡ نَادَىٰ رَبَّهُۥٓ أَنِّي مَسَّنِيَ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنُ بِنُصۡبࣲ وَعَذَابٍ
Bring to mind Our servant Job who cried to his Lord, ‘Satan has afflicted me with weariness and suffering.’
Qur’an 38:41read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A randomised trial with bereaved people found that writing out emotion about the loss did little on its own, while writing aimed at making sense of it or finding something in it helped more. A large review of therapeutic writing landed nearby, concluding that unfacilitated written disclosure gave little consistent benefit to people with long-term conditions. Both point the same way: writing with a direction and a specific subject does more than writing that only vents.
Wendy G. Lichtenthal; Dean G. Cruess (2010). Effects of Directed Written Disclosure on Grief and Distress Symptoms Among Bereaved Individuals. Death Studies doi
Nyssen OP, Taylor SJ, Wong G, Wong G, Steed E, Bourke L, Lord J, Ross CA, Hayman S, Field V, Higgins A, Greenhalgh T, Meads C. (2016). Does therapeutic writing help people with long-term conditions? Systematic review, realist synthesis and economic considerations.. Health technology assessment (Winchester, England) doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Putting a name on the anger turns it into something you can act on instead of a mood you are stuck inside.
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.
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.
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.