a My life shrouded in a benign, insulating cloud of estrogen left me ill-prepared to be so naked and shockingly angry as it fades into perimenopause. It’s exhilarating at times, but mostly awful, being angry about so many things: the government, conflicting dental advice, doing nothing about climate change, whatever cat keeps pooping at my back door. I find myself in an exhausting, irrational, rolling situation that occasionally comes to a head where I vent inappropriately, realize I’m being unreasonable, ashamedly have a word with myself, and then get angry again.
However, police say help may be at hand research from Japan, which suggests that writing your grievances on paper and then throwing it away can make you less angry. Study participants deliberately became angry because researchers criticized their work and added unnecessary offensive comments. Then participants wrote down how they felt and threw away, shredded, or kept the paper. Those who threw away the paper “completely eliminated their anger.”
Although the participants were mainly in their – less angry -? – in my early twenties, I had to test whether it also worked against midlife anger. Dispeling my anger at Boris Johnson’s or Rwanda’s policies seemed like an impossibly big ask, but I wrote them down, plus a few small, short-lived furies: “Why am I the only one concerned with expired hummus?”; “Man on gravel driveway methodically spraying small, hopeful dandelion shoots”; “Faulty laptop fan”; and “Towels stacked wet.” All classics.
I found the crumpling or tearing (I don’t have a shredder) very physically satisfying – a little haptic catharsis. But when I examined my feelings afterwards, I was as teeth-grindingly angry about Johnson’s existence as ever. The smaller irritations mostly melted away, but I think just putting my hummus on paper was enough to show me how ridiculous I was being, in a rather anger-deflating way. I’m not sure throwing out my angry scribbles added anything. What might really help manage my anger is a running complaint list, where I write about everyone and everything I’m angry with. What could go wrong?