Catarsi - You are Not So Smart by David McRaney ----------- aristoteleeplatone ippocrateefreud bushmaneilcircolovizioso contafinoadieci
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THE MISCONCEPTION: Venting your anger is an effective way to reduce stress and prevent lashing out at friends and family. THE TRUTH: Venting increases aggressive behavior over time.Read more at location 2155
Let it out. Left inside you, the anger will fester and spread, grow like a tumor,Read more at location 2157
The concept of catharsis goes back at least as far as Aristotle and Greek drama.Read more at location 2163
was Aristotle’s counterargument to Plato, who felt poetry and drama filled people up with silliness and made them unbalanced.Read more at location 2164
Releasing sexual tension feels good. Throwing up when you are sick feels good. Finally getting to a restroom feels good. Be it an exorcism or a laxative, the idea is the same:Read more at location 2168
Balancing the humors—choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic, and sanguine—was the basis of medicine from Hippocrates up to the Old West, and the way you balanced out often meant draining something.Read more at location 2170
Throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, Freud was a superstar of science and pop culture, and his work influenced everything from politics and advertising to business and art.Read more at location 2171
Thanks to Freud, catharsis theory and psychotherapy became part of psychology.Read more at location 2177
He believed your psyche was poisoned by repressed fears and desires, unresolved arguments, and unhealed wounds.Read more at location 2178
The mind formed phobias and obsessions around these bits of mental detritus.Read more at location 2179
In the 1990s, psychologist Brad Bushman at Iowa State University decided to study whether or not venting actually worked.Read more at location 2183
In one of Bushman’s studies he divided 180 students into three groups. One group read a neutral article. One read an article about a fake study that said venting anger was effective. The third group read about a fake study that said venting was pointless. He then had the students write essays for or against abortion, a subject about which they probably had strong feelings.Read more at location 2185
half were told their essays were superb. The other half had this scrawled across the paper: “This is one of the worst essays I have ever read!”Read more at location 2189
Bushman then asked the subjects to pick an activity like playing a game, watching some comedy, reading a story, or punching a bag. The results? The people who read the article that said venting worked, and who later got angry, were far more likely to ask to punchRead more at location 2190
The second study was basically the same, except this time when subjects got back their papers with “This is one of the worst essays I have ever read!” they were divided into two groups. The people in both groups were told they were going to have to compete against the person who graded their essay. One group first had to punch a bag, and the other group had to sit and wait for two minutes. After the punching and waiting, the competition began. The game was simple: Press a button as fast as you can. If you lose, you get blasted with a horrible noise. When you win, your opponent gets blasted.Read more at location 2194
The students could set the volume the other person had to endure, a setting between zero and ten, with ten being 105 decibels. Can you predict what they discovered? On average, the punching bag group set the volume as high as 8.5. The time-out group set it to 2.47.Read more at location 2198
The people who got angry didn’t release their anger on the punching bag—their anger was sustained by it.Read more at location 2200
In subsequent studies where the subjects chose how much chilli sauce the other person had to eat, the punching bag group piled it on.Read more at location 2201
you get accustomed to blowing off steam, you become dependent on it. The more effective approach is to just stop.Read more at location 2206
Bushman’s work also debunks the idea of redirecting your anger into exercise or something similar.Read more at location 2207
Bushman suggests you delay your response, relax or distract yourself with an activity totally incompatible with aggression.Read more at location 2210
Catharsis will make you feel good, but it’s an emotional hamster wheel. The emotion that led you to catharsis will still be there afterward, and if the catharsis made you feel good, you’ll seek that emotion out again in the future
