Emotions & Regulation · Mechanism

The Catharsis Myth: Venting Anger Doesn't Drain It

A 2024 meta-analysis of 154 studies found venting scores a flat zero on anger. Here's what actually lowers it, and why the popular retelling is wrong too.

by Alex July 29, 2026 18 min read

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You slam a cabinet door. You punch a pillow. You scream in the car with the windows up. It feels like pressure leaving a bottle, and that feeling is the entire reason the advice has survived a century. The idea even has a name: catharsis. Get the anger out, and it drains away.

In 2024, two researchers screened 21,951 reports to test that. They pooled 154 of them, covering 10,189 people. Activities that fire you up, the whole venting family, scored an effect of -0.02 on anger and aggression (Kjærvik & Bushman, 2024). That’s zero, within noise.

Here’s the part nobody covered: the popular retelling of that study is also wrong, and you can check it yourself in about four minutes.

The Bottom Line

• Venting isn’t a backfire. It’s a null. Arousal-raising activities scored g = -0.02, statistically the same as doing nothing (Kjærvik & Bushman, 2024).
• In the famous 2002 punching-bag study, the group that punched while thinking about fitness was no angrier than the group that just sat quietly (Bushman, 2002). On anger, rumination was the active ingredient. On aggression, the data can’t separate the two.
• Calming activities scored g = -0.63; the ones that paired calming with a cognitive step scored -0.73, roughly double the -0.34 for arousal reduction alone.
• The calming effect is weakest in the exact moment you want it: g = -0.22 for people who’d actually been provoked, with the range touching zero.
• So rehearse the technique on ordinary days. That’s where its evidence lives.

How to read the numbers here: effect sizes use Hedges’ g. Roughly, 0.2 is small, 0.5 is medium, 0.8 is large. A negative number means less anger. A “confidence interval” is the range the true answer probably sits in. When that range crosses zero, “no effect at all” is still on the table.

Heads up: this is psychology education, not therapy. If anger is damaging your relationships, your job or your safety, that’s worth a professional, not an article.

In this guide:

• Does venting anger actually work?
• What did the punching bag study really find?
• So do punching bags and rage rooms make you angrier?
• Does exercise help or hurt when you’re angry?
• What actually brings anger down?
• Why doesn’t breathing work in the middle of a fight?
• Is calling a friend to complain the same as venting?
• How strong is this evidence, honestly?
• FAQ

Does venting anger actually work?

No. Venting buys you nothing you can measure. The 2024 review by Sophie Kjærvik and Brad Bushman pooled 184 independent samples and 10,189 participants, and sorted anger strategies into two families: things that push your arousal up, and things that bring it down (Kjærvik & Bushman, 2024).

The arousal-up family is broader than the venting most people picture. The coding scheme’s example list includes yelling, hitting, kicking, screaming into a pillow and kickboxing, plus paintball and rage rooms, though as you’ll see, no study in the pool actually tested one. But the 73 studies that make up the pool are dominated by plain physical exercise, jogging, martial arts, aerobic classes, PE, not by hitting or yelling. Pooled across all 73, the effect on anger and aggression was g = -0.02, with a range from -0.13 to 0.09. That range includes zero. Doing those things wasn’t measurably different from doing nothing.

The arousal-down family did the work. Breathing, relaxation, meditation, mindfulness, yoga, pooled across 114 studies at g = -0.63. Broken out by outcome: anger -0.55, hostility -0.53, aggression -0.74. That’s a real, medium-to-large drop.

So the ledger is simple. Calming down bought a measurable drop in anger. Venting cost you twenty minutes and a sore hand, and returned nothing the instruments could detect.

What did the punching bag study really find?

It found that replaying the insult was the problem, not the punching. In 2002, Brad Bushman put 600 university students through a setup built to make them furious (Bushman, 2002). Everyone wrote a one-paragraph essay. Everyone got it back from a “partner” who didn’t exist, scored near the bottom of a 21-point scale, with a handwritten note: “This is one of the worst essays I have read!”

Then came random assignment into three groups of 200. Group one hit a 70-pound punching bag while looking at a photo of the person who’d insulted them, thinking about that person. Group two hit the exact same bag while thinking about getting physically fit. Group three sat quietly for two minutes and did nothing at all.

The quiet group came out least angry and least aggressive. The group punching while replaying the insult came out angriest and most aggressive, at d = 0.31 for anger and d = 0.30 for aggression against the control. Bushman called those effects small to moderate himself. One man in that group got so worked up he punched a hole in the laboratory wall.

Now the line every retelling drops. On how angry people felt, the group that hit the bag while thinking about fitness was statistically indistinguishable from the group that did nothing (t(594) = 0.95, not significant). Same bag. Same fists. Different thoughts. On anger, the variable that moved was the rumination.

Aggression is murkier, and worth saying out loud. The fitness group landed between the other two and couldn’t be separated from either one: not significantly above the quiet group, not significantly below the ruminating group. Bushman reads his own result the other way from the fans of this finding, writing that hitting a punching bag can raise aggression even when the person is distracted while doing it.

Still, rumination isn’t rare or exotic. It’s the 2am replay of a conversation, the mental rehearsal of what you should have said. It’s the same loop that makes one bad comment outweigh ten good ones. In the 2002 study, the anger data point at stewing rather than the punching, and the aggression data are too muddy to settle it either way.

So do punching bags and rage rooms make you angrier?

Nobody actually knows, and the confident headlines are outrunning the data. The 2024 meta-analysis gets cited constantly as proof that punching bags backfire. Look inside it. The subgroup for “punching or kicking an object” rests on seven effect sizes from just three studies, four of them from the 2002 experiment itself (Kjærvik & Bushman, 2024, coded dataset at OSF).

The authors set the bar themselves: most effects should be read with caution because of the small number of effects, under ten. Seven from three studies is under that bar, and five of the seven come from one lab, Bushman’s own. This is not a body of evidence. It’s one famous study and two companions.

Rage rooms are worse off. They appear in the study only as an example inside a coding category. They have no effect size of their own. No one has tested them directly, so “science says rage rooms don’t work” is an extrapolation wearing a lab coat.

And the headline itself slipped. In the university’s own press release, Bushman, the paper’s senior author, said any good feeling from venting “actually reinforces aggression.” The paper’s own number for those activities is -0.02, a null. A null means “we found nothing,” not “we found harm.”

Keep the honest version. Venting is a waste of your time, on the current evidence. Calling it an accelerant goes past what anyone has shown.

Does exercise help or hurt when you’re angry?

It depends entirely on which exercise, and the pattern is not the one you’d guess. In the 2024 breakdown, two activities came out significantly higher: jogging (g = 0.71, k = 17) and stair climbing (g = 0.23, but only two effects, too thin to lean on). Meanwhile ball sports, physical education classes and aerobic exercise all lowered it.

The authors’ explanation is boredom and monotony, not aggression. And there’s a clean test of that reading built into the same paper. Whether an activity was aggressive in nature made no difference to the result at all (g = -0.03 versus -0.05, p = .81). Cardio versus strength made no difference either.

So punching things isn’t uniquely toxic. Running alone with your own thoughts is the one that showed a cost. Which sounds a lot like the 2002 finding wearing running shoes: give an angry brain empty space and a grievance to chew, and it chews.

One caveat worth keeping. Stair climbing’s +0.23 sits on two effects, the same thinness problem as the punching-bag subgroup, so neither one is settled.

What actually brings anger down?

Calming activities, and they work better with a thinking step attached. Across the 2024 data, four approaches came out ahead, and they differ significantly from each other (p = .02). Meditation posted the largest effect by a wide margin.

Read meditation’s -1.55 with the usual caution: fewer studies, wider range. Mindfulness carries 152 effect sizes, so it’s the sturdiest number on the list.

Here’s the useful mechanism, though. Activities that paired lowered arousal with a cognitive component scored g = -0.73. Arousal reduction on its own scored -0.34, roughly half (p = .01). In plain terms: slowing your body down helps, and slowing your body down while doing something deliberate with the thought helps about twice as much. Breathing alone is half a tool.

Delivery barely mattered, which is genuinely good news. A therapist delivered -0.61, a trained instructor -0.78, and a digital device -0.40, with no significant difference between them. Group sessions matched individual ones. It worked for students and non-students, for people with and without an intellectual disability, in collectivist and individualist cultures, and for criminal offenders.

So the thing that works isn’t expensive, doesn’t need a professional, and doesn’t care much how you get it. That’s the sort of finding a system beats a mood is built on.

Why doesn’t breathing work in the middle of a fight?

Because almost all of the evidence for it comes from people who weren’t angry yet. This is the most uncomfortable number in the file, and it’s the one that changes the advice. In participants who’d actually been provoked, calming activities scored g = -0.22, with the range running from -0.45 to 0.0004. That upper edge touches zero.

In unprovoked participants, the same activities scored -0.68 across 265 effects. The gap between the two is statistically real (p = .005). So the strongest evidence sits where you’re calm, and the weakest evidence sits where you need help.

Be careful how you read that. It doesn’t mean breathing fails mid-argument. It means 18 study-effects couldn’t show that it clearly works there, which is a different sentence. Honest uncertainty, not a verdict.

What it does change is the plan. Treat the technique as a habit you build in calm conditions, not a fire extinguisher you grab while the room burns. A skill you’ve run three hundred times when nothing was at stake has a much better chance of showing up when something is. That’s a sizing problem, and sizing it for your worst day is the fix.

Is calling a friend to complain the same as venting?

No, and this is where the myth-busting overreaches. The pooled activities are almost entirely physical. Only two reports in the venting family (Parlamis, 2001; Tonnaer et al., 2020, both coded “talking”) involved talking at all, and neither tested phoning a friend to complain about your day (Kjærvik & Bushman, 2024, coded dataset at OSF). The number everyone quotes is mostly a number about physical exercise and hitting.

The nearest checkable evidence is about what talking does to the friendship rather than to the anger, and it comes with a trade-off that has a research name: co-rumination, meaning extensively rehashing problems and dwelling on the bad feelings together. A survey of 608 children and adolescents linked it to closer friendships and to more depression and anxiety at once (Rose, 2002). A six-month follow-up found the same loop running forward in time for girls: co-rumination predicted both rising closeness and rising depressive and anxiety symptoms (Rose, Carlson & Waller, 2007).

So talking it out is doing a job. Building the bond, on this evidence. Just not the job you thought.

Read that carefully. Those studies measured depression and anxiety, not anger, in young people, and one is a snapshot rather than an experiment. It’s a trade-off worth knowing about, not a reason to stop calling your friends.

How strong is this evidence, honestly?

Solid on the main finding, soft in several specific places, and the authors flag most of the soft spots themselves. That matters more than usual here, because this is a study everyone is quoting and almost nobody has opened.

Four honest caveats:

• The effect is much clearer in self-report. When people rated their own anger, calming activities scored -0.68. When someone else rated them, the effect dropped to -0.10 and lost significance. Behavioural observation gave -0.31 from only four studies, also not significant.
• Preregistration thins it out. Only seven of the calming studies were preregistered. In that subset the effect was -1.09, but its range ran from -2.21 to 0.03, crossing zero.
• Publication bias. The authors’ own sensitivity analysis reported “a considerable presence of publication bias and outliers” among the venting studies.
• Narrow samples. Nearly all of the venting studies, and most of the calming ones, came from individualistic countries, English-language sources, mostly the USA and Europe.

One point in the meta-analysis’s favour, since we’re counting both ways: published and unpublished studies gave near-identical results (-0.62 versus -0.66). That’s the file-drawer check passing.

The 2002 study has its own asterisk. Its aggression measure, the competitive reaction time task, was later shown to have at least 13 different documented ways of computing a score, with different choices producing meaningfully different results (Elson et al., 2014). Bushman’s study predates that critique and used a defensible version. Still, treat its anger half, a standard self-report scale, as firmer ground than its aggression half.

Worth one more line: a 2025 meta-analysis of 81 studies found people who habitually ruminate or suppress report more anger, while people who reappraise or accept report less (Pop et al., 2025). It deliberately excluded experiments and rates 69% of its own included studies as poor quality, so read it as a pattern rather than a prescription.

FAQ

Is catharsis real at all?

Not in the “drain the tank” sense. The 2024 meta-analysis found arousal-raising activities scored g = -0.02, indistinguishable from doing nothing (Kjærvik & Bushman, 2024). Venting can feel like relief in the moment. That feeling just isn’t tracking any measured drop in anger.

Should I cancel my rage room booking?

Only if you booked it as therapy. Rage rooms sit inside the category that scored a flat zero, but they’ve never been tested directly, and the punching-bag subgroup rests on seven effect sizes from three studies, four of them from the 2002 experiment. If you enjoy smashing plates, enjoy it. Don’t expect it to fix anything.

Is bottling it up better, then?

No, and nothing here says otherwise. A 2025 meta-analysis of 81 studies found habitual suppression and rumination both track with more anger, while acceptance and reappraisal track with less (Pop et al., 2025). It’s correlational. But “vent or bottle” was always a false pair.

What if I’m already furious right now?

Lower your arousal and give your mind a job, ideally not the grievance. That combination scored -0.73, versus -0.34 for lowering arousal on its own. Be realistic about it though: in provoked people the calming effect fell to -0.22, with the range touching zero. Mid-anger is the hardest case for every technique tested.

Does exercise help with anger or not?

Depends on the exercise. Jogging raised anger (g = 0.71, 17 effects) and so did stair climbing (g = 0.23, but on only two effects), while ball sports (-0.36), PE classes (-0.30) and aerobic exercise (-0.29) all lowered it (Kjærvik & Bushman, 2024). Whether an activity was aggressive made no difference at all. Solitary and monotonous looks like the risk factor, not intensity.

The Bottom Line

The catharsis myth is dead, and it deserved to die. But the replacement story circulating right now, that venting is an accelerant, isn’t in the paper either. What’s in the paper is a null: venting returned nothing measurable, and the punching-bag evidence specifically is seven effect sizes from three studies, most of them from a single 2002 experiment.

The thing that survives is unglamorous. Bring your arousal down, and give your mind something deliberate to do while you’re at it. That pairing scored -0.73, against -0.34 for lowering arousal on its own. Then accept the honest boundary: this works best in people who weren’t provoked, which means the technique is a rehearsal, not a rescue.

Believing in venting may be part of the problem too. In a 1999 experiment, people who read a message praising catharsis before hitting a punching bag went on to behave more aggressively than those who read the opposite (Bushman, Baumeister & Stack, 1999). Which makes an article like this quietly useful. You just stopped believing it.

One small action today: while you’re calm, not angry, take six slow breaths with a long exhale and name one thing that’s actually bugging you this week. Two minutes. You’re rehearsing the skill, not fixing the feeling.

Alex is the voice of Self Lab: practical psychology for people who are done with motivational fluff.

Sources

• Clinical Psychology Review (Elsevier), Kjærvik & Bushman, “A meta-analytic review of anger management activities that increase or decrease arousal: What fuels or douses rage?”, retrieved 2026-07-29, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272735824000357 (preregistration and data: https://osf.io/u3vjn/)
• Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (SAGE), Bushman, “Does venting anger feed or extinguish the flame? Catharsis, rumination, distraction, anger, and aggressive responding”, retrieved 2026-07-29, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0146167202289002 (full text PDF: https://faculty.washington.edu/jdb/345/345%20Articles/bushman(2002).pdf)
• Psychological Assessment (via PubMed), Elson, Mohseni, Breuer, Scharkow & Quandt, “Press CRTT to measure aggressive behavior: The unstandardized use of the competitive reaction time task in aggression research”, retrieved 2026-07-29, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24447279/
• Child Development (Wiley), Rose, “Co-rumination in the friendships of girls and boys”, retrieved 2026-07-29, https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-8624.00509
• Developmental Psychology (via ERIC EJ768294), Rose, Carlson & Waller, “Prospective associations of co-rumination with friendship and emotional adjustment”, retrieved 2026-07-29, https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ768294
• Scientific Reports (Nature Portfolio), Pop, Nechita, Miu & Szentágotai-Tătar, “Anger and emotion regulation strategies: A meta-analysis”, retrieved 2026-07-29, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-91646-0
• Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Bushman, Baumeister & Stack, “Catharsis, aggression, and persuasive influence: Self-fulfilling or self-defeating prophecies?”, retrieved 2026-07-29, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.76.3.367
• Ohio State University newsroom, “Breathe, don’t vent: Turning down the heat is key to managing anger” (cited only as the press release whose framing outran the paper), retrieved 2026-07-29, https://news.osu.edu/breathe-dont-vent-turning-down-the-heat-is-key-to-managing-anger/