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I don't think that is good advice. There is a lot of interesting science that suggests exactly the opposite. Being angry succeeds in only one thing: making you

• cthalupa 11y ago
  Speaking purely from my own anecdotal personal experience: Dwelling on something and thinking about how angry it makes me certainly does make me angrier. However, in the handful of times of my life that I've gotten really, truly, into a rage over something monumental, I had no way to actually let go of it until I had a chance to go scream into a pillow and punched my mattress a few times. The relief was pretty immediate - almost all of the anger drained away. Prior to that I was too amped up to do anything constructive about the issue. After, I was able to focus enough to get to work on fixing it. I don't know how to reconcile my own personal experiences with that research, outside of a cop-out answer of "Not everyone is the same".
  • dllthomas 11y ago
    I don't think the two are incompatible in the slightest. It could well be that expressing your anger violently 1) makes you feel calmer in the moment, and 2) trains you to be more likely to need to do so in the future. If that's the case, then "harmless" violent expression is a useful tool when others fail (as you've experienced - and certainly much preferable to directly harmful violent expression!), but other techniques should be learned and should be preferred out of habit. That said, it's absolutely the case that "Not everyone is the same".