Dealing with an irritating boss by writing down exactly why you find them annoying may seem a high-risk manoeuvre. However, a study suggests that the tactic can ease feelings of anger and frustration — as long as you destroy the paper afterwards.
Researchers in Japan deliberately annoyed volunteers by asking them to write brief opinions about social issues, such as whether smoking in public should be banned, and telling them their efforts were poor. The volunteers were then asked to spell out, in writing, their negative feelings.
Those who were next told to throw away what they had written seemed to experience a catharsis, with their anger level — on a scale of one to six — quickly falling to where it had been before the experiment. By contrast, those who held on to the note remained upset.
“We expected that our method would suppress anger,” said Nobuyuki Kawai of Nagoya University in Japan, the senior author of the study. “However, we were amazed that anger was eliminated almost entirely.”
The study was small, with 50 participants, and other scientists will want to see the results replicated to show the effect is real.
Advertisement
However, Kawai’s team believes the method echoes a centuries-old Japanese tradition known as hakidashisara, in which feelings of anger are set down in writing and sealed in a small vessel, which is then destroyed. Kawai said the intention was “to restore the original purity of the heart”.
• Could an anger workshop help with my midlife rage?
He believes the findings, published in the journal Scientific Reports, may help people in business who find themselves in stressful situations. “This technique could be applied in the moment by writing down the source of anger, as if taking a memo, and then throwing it away,” he said.
