Living a Meaningful Life (2/5): Why venting doesn’t help you deal with anger | Jennifer Parlamis

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2:26Hey, it's Shoshana and welcome to my summer playlist. This summer I'm spending time with an idea. What does it actually mean to live a meaningful life? We hear a lot about how to live better, how to be more productive, take care of your health, build confidence and achieve more. But meaning can be harder to pin down because it shifts as we change. Sometimes it comes from growth or accomplishment. Other times, how we handle anger, how we care for our bodies or relate to who we're becoming, or how honestly we think about the fact that our time is limited. So I pulled five conversations from the TED Health Archive that have helped me think about meaning from very different angles.

3:09You'll hear from Stacey London on confidence, identity, and redefining yourself as you get older. Jennifer Parlamis on what actually helps us deal with anger. My own take on finding a workout routine that works for your life. Ira Bedzo on the difference between success and fulfillment. And Dr. Katherine Mannix on what thinking about the end of life can teach us about living well. These conversations don't offer one answer to what makes a life meaningful. I'm not sure that there is one. But together they ask us to look a little more closely at what we value, how we spend our time, and what makes a life feel like our own.

3:47These are conversations that I really loved having, and I hope they leave you thinking a little differently about what living meaningfully looks like for you. This is TED Health, a podcast from TED, and I'm your host, Dr. Shoshana Ungerleiter. It's the beginning of a new year, and whether you're someone who loves New Year's resolutions or rolls your eyes at them, there's a good chance you've already had at least one quiet conversation with yourself that goes something like this. This year, I'm really going to stick with it. Stick with the workout plan. Stick with the meditation app. Stick with the ambitious goal that you've been carrying around for a while now.

4:29Because somewhere along the way, we absorbed a very clear message about health and success. Persistence is good. Quitting is bad. And if something isn't working, the solution is probably more discipline. That idea is so deeply ingrained that we rarely even question it. We celebrate grit. We admire people who never give up. We tell ourselves that abandoning a goal says something uncomfortable about our character. And that's exactly why today's episode felt like the right moment to launch a new segment we're introducing this year on TED Health. It's called, at least for now, What Caught My Attention.

5:07About once a month, or whenever interesting health news breaks, I'll bring you something from the world of health that stopped me in my tracks. A study, a trend, a headline that made me curious, and maybe a little suspicious too. And instead of just passing on by it, I'm going to do a deep dive into the evidence, how it's reported, and most importantly, what this means for real people trying to live healthier lives. The thing that caught my attention this time, right at the start of resolution season, was new research suggesting that we do the exact opposite of what we've been told. According to the initial reporting, giving up on certain goals might actually be good for your health.

5:51And at first, that sounds almost irresponsible. But the data are surprisingly consistent. For some goals, at some times, letting go isn't a personal failure. It can actually be an adaptive skill.

6:08Psychologists like Karsten Roche at Concordia University have studied something called goal disengagement, which is our ability to step back from goals that are no longer realistic, meaningful, or aligned with our lives. The flip side of that is goal re-engagement, which is the ability to invest in new meaningful goals instead. And across multiple studies, people who score higher on those skills tend to report better well-being, less distress, more life satisfaction, and in some research, fewer stress-related physical complaints. The basic idea is pretty intuitive. If you're chasing something that isn't working, the emotional fallout can become its own kind of chronic stressor.

6:54I'll be honest with you, realizing this kind of blew my mind, because the idea of staying committed to the same goal no matter what, the idea of grit sounds really good on paper. And like I said earlier, we often talk about grit like it's a universal virtue. Passion plus perseverance equals the secret sauce for success. Overall, grit does tend to correlate with positive outcomes, but the relationship seems to be driven mostly by one part of grit, the ability to keep putting in effort. In other words, continuing to show up can be healthy. But never changing your mind? Not always. And that distinction matters because one of the most stressful places to land isn't quitting or persisting.

7:40It's getting stuck in between. Researchers call this an action crisis. It's the mental tug of war when you're constantly asking yourself, should I keep going or should I let this go? You're not fully committed, but you're not disengaged either. You're just grinding, ruminating, renegotiating the same decision every day. And action crises aren't just frustrating. They show up in the body. Studies link them to higher perceived stress, more symptoms of depression, and elevated cortisol, especially when a goal is being pursued out of obligation. I should, rather than genuine interest. I want to. Now, none of this is a license to quit the moment things get uncomfortable.

8:26Discomfort is part of growth. But there's a difference between healthy strain and the kind of chronic identity-level pressure that keeps your body in a low-grade stress response. So as we start this year, instead of asking, how do I stick with this no matter what? A more evidence-based question might be, is this goal still workable? And is my reason for pursuing it coming from desire or obligation? And that's the heart of what caught my attention. Sometimes the healthiest move isn't try harder and harder and push yourself to your limits. Sometimes it's as straightforward as better calibration and understanding what you want and what you need.

9:11This year, with this new segment, that's what we're going to practice. Exploring health advice that actually works in real life, which statistically speaking is already a pretty ambitious goal. And that same question, when does effort help and when does it backfire, sets the stage for today's TED Talk. We've all been there. Your heart's racing, your face is flushed, and you're so annoyed, you can't stop replaying a moment in your head over and over. Whether it was a colleague that interrupted you during a meeting, a driver that swerved into your lane on the freeway, or a family member that knew just how to press your buttons.

9:50Steam out the ears. So what do you do? You vent. You call a friend, you shoot out a text, or you just rant out loud. After all, it's cathartic. And on top of that, we've been told that venting is good for us. But what if it's not? As a society, we've normalized cathartic behavior. Yell into a pillow. Pound it out on the treadmill. Smack something with a punching bag. We assume that venting releases steam. But increasing evidence suggests that venting alone can keep us in cycles of stress, anger, and potentially harm our health. And it matters because chronic anger and stress don't only change your mood.

10:31It raises your blood pressure, negatively impacts your immune system, interrupts your sleep, and could shorten your lifespan. Which means how you deal with everyday annoyances might be one of the most undervalued health-related decisions that you make. So what really works? And how do we access the energy from our anger without letting it be the driver? And how do we not only protect our own well-being, but also our relationships? Today's TEDx Talk by social and organizational psychologist Jennifer Parlamis might inspire you to think about your anger differently and more healthily too. And now Jennifer Parlamis' TEDx Talk.

11:18So I'd like to begin with a story. When my daughter was a baby, we lived in New York City. and I was there studying to get a PhD in social and organizational psychology and I was researching conflict resolution and negotiation and like most New Yorkers we would walk everywhere and I would push her in a stroller with two hands like a responsible parent all over the city but I noticed that my husband he pushed the stroller quite differently with one hand kind of off to the side and kind of looking a little bit too cool, like he had better places to be.

12:00And this really bothered me. I started to get angry and, um, I started to make all these causal attributions, what psychologists call these explanations for his behavior. One, I thought maybe, Oh, he's a hotshot wall street lawyer. Now he thinks he's too good to push a stroller. or I thought maybe he thinks women are the only ones who should push strollers or maybe he didn't care about safety. And, and that was why he was doing it that way. So as I was thinking about all these explanations for his behavior, I started to get angry and that anger started to build up. And I vented, I expressed my anger forcefully to anybody who would listen, called my friends, called my sister, but that venting didn't help release my anger.

12:51I actually felt even angrier until one day I saw my dad pushing the stroller the exact same way. He came into the city and he was taking my daughter to the park and he's walking like that. And I know my dad doesn't care about looking cool. Sorry, dad. And I said, I know I must be missing something here. What don't I know about the situation? So I asked him a simple question. I said, dad, why are you pushing the stroller like this? And he said, Oh, well, because when I use two hands, my stride is too long and I kicked the bottom of the stroller and it hurts. It actually cuts into my shins. He's like, so I much prefer it, but that's why I do it.

13:29What I realized at the time I was learning all about this cognitive bias, but I made the fundamental attribution error. This is when you over attribute the causes for someone's behavior to something internal to them, something internal and controllable rather than to some external cause. So you under emphasize the external or situational causes that might be really the explanations for someone's behavior. At that moment, I started to get really curious about venting because I thought that was helping me in some way. So as a researcher getting my PhD, I started to look into venting a little bit more.

14:08And I found out that actually venting doesn't release anger. And many years of research showed that. And I thought, well, this is really important because we have anger all around us all the time. If you think about road rage or trolls on the internet or divisive politics or wars, anger is everywhere. And maybe we're not really knowing how we should manage that. So my research early in my career asked some really critical questions. I thought one is if venting doesn't work, work. Why not? And if venting doesn't work, why do we keep doing it? Okay. So hold on to those questions for a minute because I want to back up and talk a little bit about anger.

14:49First, cognitive appraisal theorists talk about anger as not something that happens to us, but rather something that we construct in our brain when we assign explanations to some event. So when I was pushing the stroller and I saw my husband pushing it in this kind of odd way, I started to build these explanations. As I said, these internal controllable causes for his behavior and those causal attributions led to my anger. They also say that anger and attributions have this recursive process. It's a self-reinforcing process where the more I hold someone responsible for some action, the angrier I am and the angrier I get, the more I hold that person responsible.

15:38So it becomes self-reinforcing cycle. Now there's something else that happens with anger too. Anger has action tendencies. So it pushes us to act, to do something. It readies us for some action. And that's important because what I did was I vented as the action. I took my anger and I vented, but it didn't decrease my anger. So let me make this a little bit more personal for just a moment. And I want you to think about your own experience with anger. If you can take a moment right now and recall a time where you felt angry at someone, it could be maybe someone at work, maybe in traffic, maybe politics.

16:23Think about what you're angry about. And now think about those causal attributions, those explanations that you have for why this is happening. Why did this anger provoking event occur? So just take one pause and think about that. Did you make internal controllable attributions? So maybe you got cut off in traffic. Did you say, oh, that person's so inconsiderate, something about them that they had control over, or maybe someone did something else and you said, oh, they're so selfish. Or if you're thinking about maybe some particular politicians, oh, they're such a narcissist or they're incompetent.

17:01Maybe you thought that maybe, however, you made some external attributions. So maybe you said something like, well, they were late because of the snow storm, something that they're not in control over, or they had a family emergency. If you make external attributions, you tend not to get angry or less. So you may actually feel some empathy or sadness. And if you blame yourself for a negative behavior or a negative event, you might feel shame. So every attribution kind of relates to particular emotions. Now, how many of you, after this event, this anger that I asked you just to recall a moment ago, how many of you actually vented?

17:44Maybe show of hands. Some of you, yeah, okay. So some people vent as a way to deal with their anger, like I did. You would be in very good company because Freud, Sigmund Freud, advocated venting as a way to manage your anger. He actually talked about something called the hydraulic model. So the hydraulic model, he compared anger inside an individual to steam inside a hot pipe. And if you didn't vent the steam from the pipe, the pipe would explode. And similarly, he said, if people don't somehow release their anger through venting verbally, they would then act out. They would become aggressive.

18:24This metaphor, it was very compelling. It stuck, right? People believed in it and they kept doing it. However, as I said just a little moment ago, most of the research on venting shows that it doesn't work. So let's get to my research and those two questions that I said at the beginning. One, if venting doesn't work, why not? And if venting doesn't work, why do we keep doing it? My first research with my co-authors, we looked at venting verbally, which means expressing your anger forcefully to someone else. And we looked at the different targets. So we looked at either a friend, a third party, somebody who's not involved in the conflict or the offender, the person involved in whatever conflict or anger provoking incident we asked participants to recall.

19:11We also had a control group where they just recalled the anger. They didn't actually vent. And we wanted to see what happened, to see kind of the process, that first question, why isn't the venting working? And we found that when people vented to a friend, to a third party, they vented with more internal controllable attributions. And those internal controllable attributions led to that anger. And that's that self-reinforcing cycle that I just talked about a moment ago. When they vented to the offender, interestingly, they used fewer internal controllable attributions and they actually felt less angry.

19:47So we realized, we concluded the answer to why verbal venting doesn't work is because you're not changing those attributions. You're just rehearsing those attributions that led to your anger in the first place. Okay. So answer to question one, but that didn't answer question two, which is why do we keep doing it if it's not releasing our anger? So what we did next was venting doesn't happen in a vacuum, right? There's usually somebody responding to us. So we said, let's look at responses now. And we asked the third party, that friend, to give some responses to the person venting. They either reinforced the interpretation.

20:26So those explanations, those internal controllable attributions, they would say something like, yeah, you're right to be angry. They are really selfish. That would be reinforcing. Or we asked them to reinterpret. Well, have you thought about some other possible causes for this? Maybe something external. In both cases, the anger didn't change. They remained angry no matter what the response was. However, we did measure a separate emotion, something that looked at overall well-being. We called it emotional tone. And we found that emotional tone did change significantly after getting a response from the other party.

21:06And this is what we thought. And we concluded that this is why people keep venting is because venting is not just an emotional process. Venting is also a social and relational process. So we felt better. We felt heard. We felt less alone. So we vented. And so that's the answer to the second question. Why do we keep doing it? Because we might not be impacting our anger, but we are feeling better overall. That's not the whole story. One more thing. So when I asked you before some people raise their hand about venting. Maybe some people do other things when they get angry. Maybe you go for a really like long run.

21:44Some people said, yes. Yeah. Sometimes you go to the gym, maybe work out. Well, bad news. That doesn't help either. So research by researchers at Ohio state university did a very recent 2024 meta analysis where they looked at 40 years of venting research. And they found that physiologically arousing activities do not decrease anger. Verbal venting being one of those physiologically arousing activities. It raises your heart rate. It raises your blood pressure. That does not reduce anger. What does reduce anger across these 40 years of studies they found is actually activities that reduce your physiological arousal.

22:29Things like meditation, deep breathing, yoga. So what I'm saying here is really, I want to say one thing really important. Anger isn't bad. Anger is actually a motivator to do something, right? It has that action tendency and anger can get you out of a bad relationship. It can motivate you to leave a job when you have a toxic boss. It can allow you to stand up when you think that there's an injustice. It can have you fight for rights, right? So anger is a really useful emotion. However, we have to know how to regulate it. Otherwise we won't be using it. It will be using us. So we have to think about better ways to regulate our anger.

23:17Venting isn't doing it. And when I vented about my husband with the weird stroller pushing that he did. I wasn't building a bridge between us. I was actually making more distance between us. But what does and could build bridges are things that come out of this research that I've talked about today. Here are four things you can do if you're looking to regulate your anger and then use it to direct it in the appropriate ways. Engage in low arousal activities. check those causal attributions. Freud talked about venting the steam. It's not about that. It's what's going through the pipe. Think about those attributions you're making.

24:00Be more conscious of that. Remember, you might want to gather some new information. What don't you know? Ask yourself that question. And then also be very deliberate about your actions. Consider what actions you're going to take. As I said, anger can be a useful emotion. You just want to be in charge of the actions you take. And finally, to wrap up, you might be wondering what my husband's up to these days. Well, he's no longer a wall street lawyer and he actually is taking up yoga. He does it usually right before dinner when the dishes, you know, need to be put on the table. And maybe you might want to unload the dishwasher.

24:40And if I didn't know my research, I might say, he's being really selfish. He's trying to get out of responsibilities. And I might vent, I might call my sister and vent about it, but I don't. What I do instead is I ask, what don't I know? I do a little more digging. And you know, my daughter who was in the stroller so many years ago, well, she lives in London now. She's a huge fan of yoga and he's practicing a lot because she's invited him to a yoga retreat so that they can do together when they see each other next month. So if you feel yourself that little spark of anger, don't vent, check those attributions and do a little yoga.

25:16Thank you.

25:20That was Jennifer Parlamis at TEDxVA Grad in 2025. And that's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening. TED Health is a podcast from TED. I'd love to hear your thoughts about the episode. Send me a message on Instagram at ShoshanaMD. This episode was produced by me, Shoshana Ungerleiter, and Jess Shane. Edited by Alejandra Salazar. And fact-checked by Vanessa Garcia-Woodworth. Special thanks to Maria Lages, Farrah De Grunge, Daniela Balarezo, Constanza Gallardo, Tansika Sangmarnivang, and Roxanne Hilash.

26:15come over for snacks, let's make dinner together, and somehow the second you put out a fruit platter, it seems that bugs show up before your friends do. This is why I have to have my Zeevo flying insect trap. You plug it in and you let it do all the work. It's specially designed blue and UV light attracts the bugs you didn't know you had. And wow, did we have a lot. Like house flies, fruit flies, gnats, and then with Zeevo, bam, next thing you know, the pests are caught in the sticky cartridge and away from your yummy treats. without any mess or strong odors. The best part is the design is actually sleek and curved, so it hides the bugs it catches, keeping them out of sight, and when the cartridge is full, you just grab the no mess tab, throw it in the trash, pop in a new cartridge, and then you're done.

27:00No mess, no stress. So whether you're hosting a dinner party or spending an afternoon baking treats with all your friends, and you want to focus on hosting and not constantly swatting at bugs, Zivo has you covered with 24-7 bug protection. Plug in a Zivo flying insect trap so you can work smarter, not harder, and actually enjoy your time at home. Hi, this is Becca Moore from For the Girls, and this podcast is sponsored by Aerie, where you can find the right bra in 59 sizes, soft fabrics, and good fits. If your bra strap is digging into your shoulder right now, it's the wrong bra. We get so used to being in pain as girls that we forget it doesn't have to be this way.

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