The call ends, or the door closes, and the anger is still there — in the jaw, in the hands, looking for somewhere to go. Most of us were handed the same instruction for this moment, so early we never thought to ask where it came from: let it out. Hit the pillow. Scream into it if you have to. Better out than in.
The instruction has a pedigree. Freud and Breuer, writing in the 1890s, argued that pent-up feeling had to be discharged, and psychologists later built that idea into a hydraulic picture of the mind — anger as steam, the self as a boiler, catastrophe as the price of a stuck valve. The image outlived the theory. It is there when the therapist in Analyze This tells a gangster to hit a pillow when he’s angry. It was there on a Missouri billboard that read “Hit a Pillow, Hit a Wall, But Don’t Hit Your Kids!” One popular anger self-help book of the 1990s made the method explicit: picture the face of the person who hurt you on the punching bag, and give the rage to it.
In 2002, a psychologist at Iowa State University put that exact instruction to the test — and the boiler model failed it.
Six hundred angry students and one punching bag
Brad Bushman’s experiment, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, began by making 600 college students genuinely angry. Each wrote a short essay on a subject they cared about, and each got it back savaged by a fellow participant — near-bottom ratings and a handwritten verdict: “This is one of the worst essays I have read!” The insulting peer did not exist. The fury did.
Then came the sorting. One group hit a 70-pound punching bag while a photo of their supposed critic sat on a screen nearby; they were told to think about that person as they swung. This is venting as the self-help books drew it up. A second group hit the same bag but was told to think about getting physically fit, a fitness photo on the screen instead of their critic’s face. A third group was given nothing at all — they sat quietly for two minutes while the experimenter pretended to fix a computer.
Afterward, everyone reported their mood, and everyone got a chance at a small, sanctioned act of revenge: a reaction-time game in which the winner could blast the loser — supposedly the insulting critic — with noise, choosing how loud and how long.
The group that vented the way we are told to vent, face in mind, came out angriest — angrier than the distracted bag-hitters and angrier still than the people who had simply sat. They were also the most aggressive, sending louder, longer blasts than the people who had done nothing. Venting did not even buy a better mood; on positive feeling, the three groups were indistinguishable. The quiet footnote says the rest: one man in the picture-your-provoker group got so worked up mid-venting that he punched a hole in the laboratory wall.
Doing nothing at all — no technique, no coaching, just two minutes of sitting — beat the century-old advice.
Practice, not pressure
The result stops being strange the moment the metaphor changes. Bushman’s explanation, drawn from what psychologists call an associative view of anger, treats a furious mind less like a boiler and more like a path: every angry thought makes the connected thoughts easier to reach, the way a walked trail widens. Hitting a bag while holding your provoker’s face in mind rehearses the anger rather than releasing it. The body practices the swing while the mind practices the grievance, and each keeps the other warm.
The same study holds a small, telling contrast. The students who hit the bag while thinking about fitness actually hit it more times than the ruminating group — more “venting,” by the pound — and still ended up less angry than the students picturing a face. How much force left the body mattered less than what the mind was doing while it left.
What one experiment cannot carry
It is worth saying plainly what this study is and is not. The differences it found were real but modest — small-to-moderate, in the paper’s own accounting — and the sharpest finding is specific: venting while dwelling on the person who wronged you made things worse. The middle group, which hit the bag distracted, landed between the other two, and on the anger measure was not reliably different from the people who sat quietly. The clean indictment is of rehearsed venting, the kind with a face on it.
This was also laboratory anger — a rigged insult to a college student’s essay, measured minutes later in the same session. A slow resentment in a marriage, or the anger woven into grief, was not on the table. And the older research literature the paper builds on carries one narrow exception worth keeping: an influential 1977 review found that expressing anger can lower the body’s arousal in the specific case where it is expressed directly to the person responsible, with no fear of retaliation — a rare arrangement, and not one a pillow provides. Against all that sits the study’s real strength: experiments on this question have leaned the same way since the 1950s, when people who spent ten minutes pounding nails after an insult came out more hostile than people who pounded nothing.
What this can and cannot do for you
A study like this can retire a bad instruction. It cannot hand you a better one — “sit quietly” worked in a lab where the anger was minutes old and no one had to go home to its cause. And it says nothing against feeling anger or speaking it. Naming what happened to a friend, on a page, or in a counselor’s office is a different act from practicing the swing; this research indicts the reenactment, and the habit of keeping every hard feeling composed and unspoken carries its own well-documented costs, which we have written about before.
We should also say what we are: writers who read studies closely and sit with what they seem to mean — a long way from clinicians, and further still from knowing your particular anger. If yours keeps arriving, or frightens you, or has started landing on people you love, that is not a job for an essay or a punching bag; a therapist or counselor is the right room for it.
What the boiler metaphor got wrong is quietly hopeful. If anger were pressure, we would owe it an explosion, somewhere, eventually. If it is practice, we are allowed to stop rehearsing.
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