How to deal with an attack of aggression: the most effective method
Even the most balanced person can lose his temper one day.
Instead of trying to suppress aggression, you should learn to deal with it.
How exactly? The answer to this question was found by scientists from Japan working at Nagoya University.
How to deal with anger
The study involved 50 students who were asked to write a short essay listing social problems (e.g. smoking in public places, etc.).
For the work they completed, the students received feedback from doctoral students. They were fake people who deliberately assessed the essays unfairly. They gave low scores for intelligence, interest, friendliness, logic, and rationality, regardless of the content of the work.
Each review came with the same comment: "It's incredible that an educated person can think like that. I hope they teach him something at university."
The study's authors rightly expected that unfair assessment would provoke aggression. They also asked students to express their opinions about the feedback on paper, focusing on what exactly made them angry.
After this, some of the students had to place the piece of paper with their thoughts in a transparent box on their desk, while others were supposed to destroy the document in a shredder.
In the final stage, volunteers filled out a questionnaire in which they indicated their level of anger at the moment of receiving the grade for the essay and after destroying or saving the sheet with emotions.
All participants reported experiencing a flare-up of anger after receiving low grades on their essays and offensive comments. However, the level of aggression decreased for those who destroyed the paper with their thoughts, returning to the original value. Those who kept the document continued to feel angry.
Hence the conclusion: if you want to deal with aggression as quickly as possible, pour out all the negativity on paper and destroy it in any convenient way.
