Why women are taking their anger out in rage rooms

“There was definitely a moment of discomfort at the start,” says Deena, but she says her visit to a so-called rage room felt very different to what she’d expected.

She didn’t feel chaotic or aggressive smashing things up, but instead “surprisingly controlled and a lot more intentional”.

“Once I settled into it, it felt like more of a physical release as opposed to an emotional outburst,” she told the BBC.

Deena is one of a reportedly growing number of women choosing to pay to hammer and bash old items such as TVs, furniture and crockery whilst kitted out in specialist protective gear.

The concept of rage rooms is believed to have originated in Japan in the late 2000s, whilst a woman called Donna Alexander says she created an “anger room” in her Texas garage around the same time, allowing people to come in and smash up items that had been fly tipped.

There are still only a small number of venues in the UK where people are handed a baseball bat and let loose. They’ve been touted as one way to alleviate stress and release pent-up anger.

But what seems surprising is the client base, with some owners saying most of their customers are women.

Deena says she initially tried one “out of curiosity”.

“I’m not an angry or volatile person, I come across as a very calm and composed individual so initially it did feel quite strange and almost wrong.

Afterwards, she “felt a lot lighter, a lot calmer,” comparing the experience to hitting “a reset switch” or having “a really good deep tissue massage”.

Deena says her job is fast paced and involves “a lot of responsibility and constant decision making,” and now thinks a rage room could help her with this. If she gets too stressed, she would visit one again, she says.

Similarly, Shuka says she didn’t feel angry, but wanted to see how it felt to “let loose” and was given a car to smash up whilst listening to a playlist of her favourite songs.

“It was way more satisfying than I expected, there was something weirdly freeing about smashing things and not having to be careful.

“Afterwards I felt like I’d done a workout for my brain as well as my body,” she says.

Kate Cutler, the co-owner and founder of a rage room in East Sussex, says it’s “getting busier and busier” with female customers.

She decided to set it up whilst her daughter, who has since died, was battling brain cancer. Going to a rage room had been on her bucket list.

She says some women come in because they’ve been cheated on or had a difficult break-up and sometimes just because “they have anger coming from nowhere.”

Author and psychotherapist Jennifer Cox told Radio 4 Woman’s Hour she believes women are “conditioned” to repress feelings of “frustration, anger, aggression and rage”.

Often, she says women, in particular – end up “sandwiched” between the demands of work, parents and small children, and can end up “furious.”

Really they should let it out, she says, and thinks spaces like this, which allow women to release their anger can be very helpful.

She suggests setting up “mini rage rooms in the home” by piling up cushions and pillows and “really going for it” in order to release some of that anger and stress.

“When we repress [rage] it comes out in our bodies in all sorts of different ways – anxiety, depression, OCD, migraines, stomach problems,” she added.

Shelly Dar, a mental health therapist, agrees, telling Radio 5 Live rage rooms can provide “an instant relief”, and you can feel calmer and clearer afterwards.

It’s healthy to feel angry, she says, but it gets a bad reputation because we see the outburst, not the build up.

“And because we are so overloaded with life, there isn’t a safe space to express anything messy,” Shelly said.

Spaces like these are one way for women to get their feelings out safely, she says.

“A lot of the problem for women nowadays is that we don’t want to be judged, so we have to keep all of these emotions in, playing the good girl role, maybe being the calm mother, the calm reflective parent, and we have been socialised to be nice.”