‘I didn’t think I was angry’

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

She didn’t feel chaotic or aggressive while breaking things, but rather “surprisingly controlled and much more intentional.”

“Once I settled in, it felt more like a physical release than an emotional explosion,” she told the BBC.

Deena is one of a growing number of women who are choosing to pay to hammer and break old items such as televisions, furniture and crockery while being fitted with specialist protective equipment.

The concept of anger rooms is thought to have originated in Japan in the late 2000s, while a woman called Donna Alexander says she created an “anger room” in her Texas garage around the same time, allowing people to go in and break objects that had been knocked over.

There are still only a small number of places in the UK where people get a baseball bat and run wild. They have been touted as a way to reduce stress and release pent-up anger.

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

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

“I’m not an angry or volatile person, I seem like a very calm and collected person, so at first it seemed quite strange and almost fake.

Afterwards, she “felt a lot lighter, a lot calmer,” likening the experience to “a reset switch” or 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 task. If she’s too stressed, she’ll go back, she says.

Similarly, Shuka says she didn’t feel angry, but wanted to see what it felt like to “let go” and was given a car to wreck while listening to a playlist of her favorite songs.

“It was a lot more satisfying than I expected, there was something strangely liberating about breaking things and not having to pay attention.

“Afterward, I felt like I had gotten a workout for my brain as well as my body,” she says.

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

She decided to create it while her daughter, who has since died, was battling brain cancer. Going to a rage room was on his bucket list.

She says some women come because they’ve been cheated on or had a difficult breakup and sometimes simply because “they have anger that comes out of nowhere.”

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

Often, she says, women, in particular, find themselves “sandwiched” between the demands of work, parents and young children, and can end up being “furious.”

In fact, they should let their anger out, she says, and she thinks spaces like this, which allow women to express their anger, can be very helpful.

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

“When we repress [rage] it shows up in our bodies in all sorts of different ways: anxiety, depression, OCD, migraines, stomach issues,” she added.

Mental health therapist Shelly Dar agrees, saying Radio 5 Live’s rage rooms can provide “instant relief”, and you may feel calmer and clearer afterwards.

It’s healthy to feel angry, she says, but it gets a bad rap because we see the explosion, not the buildup.

“And because we’re so overloaded with life, there’s no safe space to express anything messy,” Shelly said.

Spaces like these are a way for women to express their feelings safely, she says.

“A lot of the problem for women these days is that we don’t want to be judged, so we have to keep all these emotions inside, play the role of good girl, maybe be the calm mother, the calm, thoughtful parent, and we’ve been socialized to be nice.”