Rage rooms are all the rage but are they a healthy way of venting anger?

Places where people pay to smash things to let out their anger might just be a temporary fix, say experts

It was 2017 and Anushka Gupta (name changed on request) was looking for a way to “let it all out”. So she did something that was, to put it mildly, out of the ordinary. She headed to a scrapyard near her house in New Delhi, paid the worker there Rs 500 as he looked at her incredulously, armed herself with a spanner and furiously started attacking everything she saw in that small shed.

She smashed the TV, the music systems and the metal cans. She stomped on and crushed the many discarded earphones. Then she turned her attention to a forlorn teddy bear and proceeded to rip it apart. It was some 40 minutes before she finally stopped – exhausted but “feeling much better,” she says.

Gupta, who had been bottling up her rage for weeks after a traumatic encounter, had just given herself what psychologists call “destruction therapy”.

A few thousand kilometres away in Indore, the concept was already in business.

Atul Malikram, 54, had opened Café Bhadaas in 2017, a place where one could go to vent anger by breaking things – for a small fee.

Rage rooms – also called break rooms, anger rooms, destruction rooms or smash rooms – are now, well, a rage in several Indian cities. One recently opened in Bengaluru for people aged 18 and above.  

Before this, in October 2022, Hyderabad got one. Gurugram, too, had a break room but it shut down some years ago.

The Hyderabad place was started by 25-year-old Suraj Pusarla, who works at a start-up. The idea struck him while he was sitting with friends and discussing how “as kids, it was acceptable to break things to express what you were feeling. Sometimes as adults, you need to vent just like that.”

That was the start of The Rage Room. Pusarla sourced defunct articles from scrap dealers to fill up two rooms.

Turns out that the people turning up here aren’t necessarily the ones who need to let it out – like Gupta.

“I am doing it as a fun activity for people looking to have a good time,” says Pusarla. “Most people we see are couples on dates looking to have a different experience.”

That said, at least 3 per cent of the registrations are from those who are genuinely angry and want an outlet for that anger.

Here’s how it works. Visitors pay between Rs 800 and Rs 2,800 for a 20-minute rage session, where they get to break things like crates and e-waste, and to play darts. The place provides visitors with a protective suit, a helmet with a visor, gloves and shoes to prevent injuries.

The waste from the sessions goes for recycling and new material is sourced every Sunday. The Rage Room has seen more than 500 customers in the last 100 days, says Pusarla.

In Indore, the experience is personalised.

The actual anger room is filled with stuff related to the kind of anger one is feeling.

So, for a lovers’ tiff, the room is filled with gift boxes, heart-shaped balloons, bedsheets and paintings that one can break, burst or tear. For anger related to the workplace, it is customised with an office look: tables, computers, chairs, phones etc.

“I came across the concept when I was travelling to Germany and Australia,” says Malikram, the man behind it. “I understand that anger is a basic emotion and needs to be let out,” he adds. “There are different ways to do that. Some people hit the gym; some listen to music. Breaking things can be a good outlet for some others.”

He also has therapists on call to help people who might need more than just a temporary fix. In the six years since he started, the anger room in Indore has had over 1,700 visitors.

What anger management experts say

While it may be therapeutic for some to break things to let out negative emotions, anger management specialists feel that the concept is only a temporary fix and can lead to long-term damage if not handled properly.

“It is a dumb idea, but it works like some other dumb ideas,” says Ashish Sehgal, a Gurugram-based anger management specialist.

“While breaking things can be cathartic in that moment, the release is only temporary,” he adds. “It has its benefits, but I don’t think those are intelligent benefits. It draws from destruction therapy but takes a very anti-therapeutic approach to the problem, where the mind is programmed to not think of the consequences.”

The consequence theory begs people to ask the question: What will be the consequence of my actions?  

Agrees Shivani Sadhoo, an anger management specialist with Saarthi, a counselling service based in New Delhi. “The question one needs to ask is that in the absence of such smash rooms, how will someone express their anger? Will they go back home and break things there? Will they hit people? It programmes the brain to violently express the emotion, which is not healthy.”

Both Sehgal and Sadhoo say that small actions like having a sip of water or counting back from 20 can help dissipate the urge to violently express anger in five out of 10 cases.

In a society recovering from a life-altering experience of a pandemic and changing workplace scenarios given the economic instability, how can society come together to tackle anger?

“I would agree that Covid has thrown people off-balance and they have been living on the edge for some reason or the other. The first thing is acknowledging that people are angry and taking it seriously,” says Sadhoo.

“We should have more support groups, where people can talk openly about negative emotions without feeling cornered and blamed,” she adds. There is also a case to be made for affordable therapy.