Have you ever waited weeks for delivery to arrive of that one special item, only when it does, it is wrong. Or, perhaps you ordered a takeaway, and they forgot half of your food? Or maybe your man just cheated on you with the babysitter? Whatever the reason is, most of will suffer from being angry at one point or another, and we often feel that if we just let it all out, then we will feel much better about the whole situation after. This is what is called venting, and until recently, most of us were fooled into thinking this was benefiting us.
However, recent studies have shown that venting can often actually make us feel worse than we did, to begin with. Brad Bushman, a professor of psychology and communication at the Ohio State University carried out research to prove this. His experiment involved asking 600 students to write a heated essay about abortion which he advised would then be marked by fellow classmates to ensure fairness. In reality, the professor wrote negative and unworthy feedback on all of them.
When the students received back their papers, they were, of course, angry with the comments, which is what Bushman wanted. He then asked all the students to deal with their anger and frustrations in different ways. One group were hitting a punching bag while thinking of the person who graded their paper while another did the same task but only thought about getting fit. The third group were used as a control group and were told to sit back and do nothing but bottle up that anger.
The results from the experiment showed that those who took out their anger on the punching bag felt much worse at the end of the session than those who did nothing. Even back in 2007, research carried out showed that in releasing our anger, we are putting our mental health and others at risk.
Venting online is no different either, and can be worse than ranting to someone as there is no one to take all that directed anger online. As you type and rant, your feelings just get stronger and with no one on the receiving end, there is no pause time, which only fuels the anger and allows it to escalate. What we all should be doing, rather than blindly ranting and raging online is just to take a moment to calm down and turn off the computer when we get the feeling that our fingers are about to fire out some negativities. It might just save us and the receiver a whole lot of trouble.
Related; Anger on the Internet: The Perceived Value of Rant-Sites
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