Guide to Destructive Therapy: Is It Beneficial For You?

We all have felt somewhere in our lifetime that daily work becomes stressful for us. For some people, the stress is increased to the extent that they start going into depression. Ultimately, they have to go for treatment because otherwise, they could not get their job done. People use different methods to cope with the rising stress and depression, which is either due to the increased workload or any other thing. One of the methods which is rising in popularity among people is destructive therapy. It is also known as the rage room experience, rage room therapy, or simply rage rooms. Despite its increase in popularity, the topic remains a controversial one, with people having different opinions about it. So, the question is whether destructive therapy is beneficial for you or not. This article will discuss the destructive therapy and its benefits.

Destructive therapy (or rage rooms) is a type of therapy used by people to release excessive stress, anxiety, and negative emotions by breaking, smashing, and destroying nearby things, usually in a closed room full of useless things (rage rooms).

A rage room is a closed room in which an individual who is suffering from a lot of stress, anxiety, negative energy, and emotions is allowed to enter and smash and break objects. These rooms are also called anger rooms or smash rooms. 

The idea behind rage rooms is to provide the stressed individual with a controlled and relaxed environment and a closed room in which he or she can do anything they want, to smash or break things just to release their anger, anxiety, negative energy, and emotions. Have you ever noticed in yourself or in others that whenever they are filled with anger, stress, and sorrow, they start breaking things and smashing anything that is near to them? So the rage room idea is derived from this human nature.

• We all feel negative emotions or stress somewhere in our busy work schedule. But if the negative emotions or stress are increased in our mind, then we have to vent it somewhere. Unlike the mistakes made by most people, we should not keep them inside of our bodies for a longer time. Keeping the negative emotions, energy, and stress inside you will only make it worse, and it will increase further. So it is the right advice to take some time out from your busy work schedule and vent all your stress and negative emotions. You can do that on your weekends.

• But what is the best way to kick your stress and negative emotions out of your body? As most people say, according to the reports, it is destructive therapy. And it is also logically correct. In this therapy, you finally find a place in which there are only you and no one else. You can do everything you want just to release your stress and feel relaxed.

• In this therapy, you are given something to smash on other things that are nearby you. You break things as long as you want. You can continue doing this until all of your stress and anger go away.

• So destructive therapy works optimally for people who are feeling stressed particularly due to work overload.

• Rage rooms are an up-and-coming attraction for adults just looking to blow off a little bit of steam. You, too, could get into a room where you demolish and destroy just anything you want with no consequences, and, the best part is you don't have to do any cleanup. Just pay a few bucks and you get to enjoy a smashing experience with all your best friends. The first rage room was opened in 2008 in Japan. Of course. But now they just seem to be popping up all over.

• Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of these rage rooms promote their services as rejuvenating. This kind of angry expression is good for you. So they say that it benefits your mental health by lowering your anxiety, relieving stress, lowering your blood pressure, and helping you prevent burnout at work. Well, in that case, it’s sort of a “smash therapy.” There are even memberships as cheap as $100 a year, so you can smash every weekend if you want.

Is rage therapy a “thing”? It’s a well-known suggestion that if you feel angry, you should just scream into your pillow or punch your pillow. But the idea behind this age-old advice is that pent-up anger is bad. You don’t want to let it build and build until you explode and punch your coworker in the face. So, instead, take it out on something that won’t get you in trouble. Like a pillow.

This concept of releasing anger, or any emotion for that matter, is called catharsis. And the “catharsis hypothesis” has been used in therapy since the days of Freud. It’s hotly debated whether the expression of repressed or ignored emotions helps us address those underlying feelings. Aggression is its own subtype of catharsis with a wide range of behaviors, including playing violent video games and taking somebody to court. But since we’re talking about rage rooms. Let's specifically focus on aggressive acts like yelling, slamming doors, destroying property, and hitting things.

• The idea of releasing your anger as a psychological treatment really came into popularity in the 60s and 70s with the birth of primal therapy. This form of treatment believed that mental health issues were caused by repressed childhood traumas that had not yet been resolved. So, to resolve them, therapists helped clients re-experience those traumas and express their pain.

• How do you do that? Well, by screaming at the top of your lungs, punching things, and getting lubed up and pushed through a 10-foot-long tube to re-live your birth. It sounds wild, but folks like John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and James Earl Jones all swore by it. So, of course, you should trust them. They’re famous. Or, if you’re smart, then you won't trust anyone.

• But, since that time, history has not been kind to primal therapy. Many studies looked at its efficacy and in 2006, the American Psychological Association classified this form of treatment as “discredited” due to its lack of scientific evidence. That doesn’t seem promising for rage

• therapy. But Primal Therapy had a lot of dubious practices going on in addition to the yelling and punching. What if we only look at the aggressive acts themselves?

• There is evidence that catharsis works. In a few studies, the experimenter purposefully annoyed or angered some participants and then gave them the opportunity to retaliate against the experimenter or someone who was related to the experimenter, either by giving electric shocks or harsh negative feedback. Turns out, this kind of aggression actually lowered the participants’ blood pressure and heart rate back to levels before being annoyed. That’s great! That's good news!

• However, in a follow-up study, they did the same experiment but then let the participant attack some innocent person instead. What they found was that when the person would aggress against this instead of the actual experimenter, it didn’t reduce their tension. So it seems like catharsis works best when it feels like we’re evening the score or getting justice with the person who hurt us.

• So just 3D print a bust of your least favorite politician, bring it to the rage room, and boom, have a smashing experience, right? It should be as easy as that. Here we go. But it turns out that this may not even be enough. In another study with kids, school-age children were purposefully annoyed by older children and then given the opportunity to take out their anger on inanimate objects. But it didn't work. Afterward, those kids were just as likely to aggress against the kid who frustrated

• them. In another study, participants were irritated by the researcher and then were asked to hit a punching bag and either think about the researcher or think about becoming physically fit. The folks who thought about the researcher became more aggressive. So, is catharsis only effective when you can inflict harm directly on the person who annoyed you? Who knows. And the answer is: not entirely. 

• There’s plenty of research to show that blowing off steam can reduce stress immediately afterward. It makes you feel good. A kind of training such as operant conditioning using your cats uses rewards to increase a particular behavior. So, if you feel better after expressing your anger, then aren’t we just reinforcing that behavior? Will that feeling just make you want to be more angry more often? Indeed, it does.

• It turns out that if you feel better after punching a wall, well, then you’re more likely to punch the wall again in the future. You’ve essentially been rewarded for your actions. So, yeah, if you go to a rage room and you use it as an outlet for your anger, you could be making yourself more likely to be aggressive. 

Destructive therapy or rage rooms have a lot of benefits. Following some examples are given below;

The destructive therapy clears your mind from all the things that have disturbed you in the past few weeks. You are able to throw the things as you want. The things, if not cleared from your head, will interfere with and disrupt your normal thinking process. Each and every action is controlled by your brain. When you cannot think properly, then you cannot do the right actions. So it is very necessary to clear your mind from such thoughts. When your mind is cleared, then you can think normally and really focus on the things you need to.

• Destructive therapy destroys all the negative energy and negative emotions from your mind and helps you focus on your work. If you keep your negative energy with you for a long time, it can get you serious consequences. That energy will increase with time. You can vent that energy by smashing the things that are important to you while doing some work. It is also possible that you will vent that energy in your working space to your co-worker or your working station.

• A lot of cases like these have been reported many times where the worker, while working in the office, smashes things just because of negative energy, emotions, and stress build up in your mind over time. For example, the video below shows the recorded CCTV footage of a person working in the office, and just because his printer was not working fine, he smashed the printer. This all happened because of the negative energy built up in his mind.

• When you are smashing things with the way you want and as many things as you desire, and also you know that this activity will result in no consequences, then obviously it will result in fun and joy. When you are spending a whole week working all day or all night, then you definitely have to try something which gives you fun and entertainment for at least some hours on the weekends.

• And we all have to agree that nothing can be better than destructive therapy. It does two things, which makes it a perfect therapy for you to counter your daily stressful work schedule. First, it vents off negative energy from your mind and clears it, providing relaxation. The second thing that it provides is fun and activity which you are unable to find throughout the week in your busy work schedule.

Destructive therapy is very useful for venting your rage, anger, negative emotions, negative energy, stress, and depression. So, if you are the one suffering from such things, you should try destructive therapy. It will help you feel relaxed and help a lot in your normal daily work schedule.