By John Salak –
Everybody gets angry—even the great pacifist Mahatma Gandhi had to have his moment when he was ready to blow his cool. Anger, after all, is normal. How to get rid of it without clocking someone is another matter entirely.
Mental Health America recommends 10 different ways of carefully letting off steam. They include throwing something (safely), screaming in private, singing out loud, dancing or working out, among others.
Japanese researchers from Nagoya University recently offered up another option, one they report is amazingly successful. They claim writing down a person’s reaction to a negative incident on a piece of paper and then shredding it or throwing it away helps melt anger.
“We expected that our method would suppress anger to some extent,” lead researcher Nobuyuki Kawai said. “However, we were amazed that anger was eliminated almost entirely.”
If these researchers are correct, the paper-shred technique will not only help the angry feel better, it could lessen the negative work and personal life consequences of rage.
Anger management techniques, of course, aren’t new. Many like those offered up by Mental Health America have been around for years. Unfortunately, it is difficult to determine their effectiveness because they lack empirical research support, according to the Japanese team. Many of these techniques face challenges because they are difficult to remember when someone is angry.
The university claims its findings are different and based on years of previous research on the link between the written word and anger reduction. The results are also built on studies showing how interactions with physical objects can control a person’s mood.
The team’s research involved having participants write brief opinions about important social problems, such as whether smoking in public should be outlawed. The participants were then told that a doctoral student from the university would evaluate their writing.
The doctoral students were plants. Every participant was scored low on intelligence, interest, friendliness, logic and rationality regardless of what they wrote. The plants also helped fuel the participants’ fury by adding insulting comments to their papers such as, “I cannot believe an educated person would think like this. I hope this person learns something while at the university.”
The researchers asked the participants to write their thoughts on the feedback, focusing on what triggered their emotions. One group was then told to either dispose of their paper in a trash can or keep it in a file on their desk. A second group was told to destroy the document in a shredder or put it in a plastic box. The students were then asked to rate their anger after the insult and after either disposing of or keeping the paper.
Not surprisingly, all participants reported a higher level of anger after receiving insulting comments.
What changed was the anger levels of those discarding or shredding their returned papers dissipated after getting rid of them. Those who held on to a hard copy only registered a small decrease in their rage.
“This technique could be applied at the moment by writing down the source of anger as if taking a memo and then throwing it away when one feels angry in a business situation,” Kawai explained.
The Japanese researchers suggest the paper-shredding technique should transcend cultures. However, they noted that their work may also shed light on the origins of the Japanese cultural tradition known as hakidashisara, which refers to the purging or spitting out of something that makes the Japanese angry.
