The method that science recommends to get rid of anger

A study by Japanese experts found that When you feel blinded by anger, instead of taking it out on your colleagues or yelling into a pillow, it is more effective to calm yourself down by writing down your feelings and then tearing up the paper.

“We expected that our method would calm anger to some extent,” said Nobuyuki Kawai, lead author of the study published this week in the scientific journal Scientific Reports.

“However, we were surprised that it eliminated anger almost completely,” said Kawai, who is an academic in cognitive science at Nagoya University.

For the experiment, 100 students were recruited and asked to write in a brief format their opinions on different topics, such as whether smoking should be prohibited in public places.

The researchers told them that a doctoral student at Nagoya University was going to evaluate their intelligence, interests, logical thinking, and rationality.

But regardless of their answers, the evaluators gave them all a low score and also gave them written feedback on their performance with messages such as “I can’t believe an educated person thinks this way. I hope this person learns something in the university”.

Participants were then asked to describe their feelings in writing and divided into two groups. The “retention group” kept their opinions in a transparent folder or in a box and the rest wrote their feelings on paper and then threw the paper away or shredded it.

All of the students tested experienced increased feelings of “subjective anger” after being insulted, the study noted.

But, in the so-called “retention group” the levels of subjective anger remained high, while in the other participants anger decreased to the point of being neutralized.

The researchers claim that these discoveries can be applied to anger control.

“Managing anger at home or at work can reduce its negative consequences,” they argued.