Do rage rooms really help manage anger better?

They are rooms in which to break things a little for fun and a little to let off steam: they can give relief, but mostly momentary

Exercising is considered one of the most useful ways to get rid of stress and in some cases even anger, but there are also those who get a similar sensation from smashing bottles or appliances with a crowbar until they are reduced to hundreds of small pieces. Since breaking things at home is not really recommended, there are places where you can do it legally and safely, the so-called “rage rooms”. These “anger rooms” are promoted as solutions for venting frustrations and aggression, but their usefulness for dealing with more serious ailments is debated.

Rage rooms are soundproofed rooms where one person or small groups of people can smash printers, dent washing machines, and hit bottles with baseball bats, large hammers, or metal bars. A session lasts from 15 minutes up and the cost varies according to the time, the number of participants and what you want to break: usually for a few tens of euros each person is entitled to about twenty generic objects, such as glasses, plates and ceramic mugs, and to one or two medium-sized ones, including vases, pictures, radios, and printers. For an extra cost then you can request to use a different tool, such as a spade or a golf club, to have larger objects available or to bring your own things to break.

Usually such a room is about forty square meters in size and is lined with sound-absorbing and protective panels both on the walls and on the floor. When it is used, hard rock songs start playing which serve to give the charge and are the background to flying dishes, beaten monitors and shattered bottles. The music, at rather high volumes, serves to cover the noise of the tools banging against things, but also the screams or insults of those who are breaking them: rage rooms are designed to be, so to speak, private places, in which lawful to do something that would normally be prohibited or otherwise unseemly.

To access the rooms it is necessary to wear a helmet, gloves and body protection, and respect some safety rules, including – obviously – not to behave violently towards other people. The staff monitors through video cameras that whoever is inside the room does not become too aggressive, and intervenes if necessary.

Some trace the origin of rage rooms to 2008, when a place was opened in Tokyo where it was possible to throw cups and plates against a wall to vent stress. In the following years similar places sprang up in other countries as well, where things could be split with the help of various tools, again for similar reasons. Starting about ten years ago, rage rooms were opened in the United States, Argentina, the United Kingdom and also in Italy: the first was the Chamber of Anger in Forlì, in 2013, and then others followed, for example in Rome , in Bologna and Bari. Today those have been closed, but new ones have been opened in various cities including Milan, Turin and Genoa.

It’s hard to say for sure what drives a person to experience a rage room and determine what audience they’re targeting. A customer who has been with his wife and son to Anger Games, a company with several offices in Italy, says it was driven by anger, while a woman who tried it with her teenage daughter and a friend had the curiosity to know what it was like to do something that normally cannot be done. In short, there are those who want to try something unusual just for fun and those who actually look for a way to relieve stress or a more complicated suffering to deal with, such as mourning.

Daniele Boccardi and Gabriele Uperi, the employees of a rage room in Milan, say that those who go there for the first time always seem a little strange at first and are often embarrassed at the idea of ​​starting to smash everything, but then they gets the hang of it rather quickly. Some of those who tried the experience on a midweek evening in March say they found it almost frustrating not being able to “get the job done” by completely smashing a monitor or a more solid statuette than expected. However, everyone says they felt satisfied, a little more relaxed, and would do it again right away.

For Danny Defabiani, the manager of a restaurant in the province of Vercelli, it was, for example, “cathartic” to be able to break glass bottles, which reminded him of his job. Boccardi also tells of a woman in her 60s who had suffered a death in her family, and who told him she was deeply surprised by the experience: she knew that by smashing things in the rage room “it wouldn’t have solved everything, but she said she saw it as a starting point”.

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Sometimes rage rooms are used for so-called team building, i.e. activities designed to strengthen team spirit between colleagues or collaborators. In some cases, however, psychotherapists advise patients who have problems managing emotions to try them, with the idea that they are places where they can vent anger in a controlled way.

Both in the United States and in the United Kingdom it has been observed that the majority of people who frequent rage rooms are made up of women, a trend also confirmed by those who manage them in Italy (Anger Games employees say that they are 60-70 percent). One reason could be the fact that men and women tend to handle stress differently, as explained by a study by the American Psychological Association, the organization that brings together psychologists in the United States. In general, in fact, it is more frequent for the former to vent their stress through physical activity, while the latter by talking or letting off steam with other people.

A study conducted in 2015 by Arizona State University in collaboration with the University of Illinois at Chicago showed that women also tend to be judged more negatively than men when they express anger. For these reasons, some have hypothesized that rage rooms can be perceived by women as generally more reserved places to vent their frustrations, because they are not seen, heard or judged by anyone, as would happen in everyday life.

There are few people who return more than once, but in some cases it happens, say the employees of the rage room in Milan, which in any case usually has a queue of about a month for bookings. Both Boccardi and Uperi say they have never seen excessively violent behavior or major accidents: despite the protections, it is still possible to get some cuts.

On the one hand, the idea that venting emotions through one’s body can have positive effects is not new. On the other hand, various psychotherapists argue that breaking things gives only a temporary sense of satisfaction, but that in the long run it can be dangerous.

In its most widely accepted definition, anger is an emotion that arises in various types of situations, such as when you are unable to satisfy your need, you do not receive a reward you think you deserve, or you feel treated unfairly. We often tend to perceive it as a negative emotion, but as psychotherapist Sabrina Verderio explains, it has its uses: it can motivate a person to do something they otherwise wouldn’t have done and can therefore turn into positive gestures and actions. If not expressed constructively and managed appropriately, however, it can lead to aggressive behavior.

In a book dedicated to techniques on how to deal with daily stress, US psychology professors Charles Brooks and Michael Church write that “there is no doubt” that venting one’s aggression on inanimate objects as one does in a rage room can cause ” an effect of immediate satisfaction. The problem however is that this sense of satisfaction is only temporary. According to psychologist Kevin Bennett, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, the fact is that hitting inanimate objects can lead a person to transform their frustrations into acts of physical violence whenever they feel anger or anxiety, in the mistaken belief that is a way to vent them in a healthy and definitive way.

In short, as the clinical psychologist Ramani Durvasala summarized, «since anger is such a variegated phenomenon, a rage room could be an outlet» for those who are able to manage their emotions effectively, but «it could simply making anger more persistent” in other people.

Verderio also agrees, who while recognizing the usefulness of exploiting the body to manage emotions, notes that the gesture of destroying things does not seem like a suitable strategy to resolve anger, anxiety or frustrations in a lasting way.

Verderio has been dealing with “mindfulness” for ten years, a form of meditation that derives from Buddhism and which, stripped of religious elements, is used for the treatment of stress, depression and other mental health disorders. Since 2017 he has also dedicated himself to bioenergetic analysis, a method of psychotherapy that integrates bodily exercises with traditional verbal psychotherapy interviews. For example, a person who does therapy with this approach is invited to kneel down and beat his fists on a mattress, and at the end of the exercise he comments on his sensations during the execution of those gestures with a psychotherapist.

According to this method, in this way it is possible to effectively channel anger, anxiety or frustrations in precise and controlled gestures, gain awareness of one’s emotions and at the same time dissolve the tensions accumulated on a physical level.

A comparative study published in 2022 in the journal Current Psychology instead suggests a somewhat different approach. Based on the analysis of the results of 46 clinical studies on various aspects of anger management, the study concludes that the most effective path to manage and prevent anger combines mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy, one of the most popular psychotherapy approaches , which aims to help a person identify their recurring behaviors and their ways of reasoning or interpreting reality, with the aim of replacing or integrating them with more functional ones.

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