How I found inner calm... by smashing up an entire room with a baseball bat!
Forget mindfulness. Overwrought women are venting their anger in Ireland’s new Rage Room
ALL the angry ladies, all the angry ladies, put your hands up! Or better still, grab a baseball bat, hammer and axe grinder and smash the hell out of an inanimate object. Unleashing fury on an old photocopier or a crate of empty beer bottles might seem like a completely insane idea — but believe me when I tell you, it feels great, possibly even better than it should.
I should know, as I’ve just emerged from Ireland’s first rage room. For the uninitiated, that’s a smash room or anger room — a safe, controlled environment where people can vent their rage by destroying objects. They are now all the, well, rage.
The first one actually opened back in 2008 in Japan but in the last few years, the therapeutic trend has really taken off. Since then, hundreds of stress-relieving smash rooms have opened worldwide, including Break Room in Los Angeles, where socialite Paris Hilton posted a picture of herself smashing a flat-screen TV and what looked like a photocopier.
‘Nothing wrong with letting out a little rage,’ she wrote on Instagram.
On TikTok, videos of women smashing objects in rage rooms attract millions of viewers — @vickaboox advised her 813,000 followers, ‘Block his number and smash up a printer instead.’
Vicky, I hear you. After traversing a marriage separation, a house move, a couple of ill-fated relationships — don’t get me started on dating apps — and having just gotten through a Covid-filled Christmas, honestly, I’m a woman on the edge.
I know I’m not alone. In fact, a recent study found that women report being 6 per cent angrier and more stressed than men, which experts believe is thanks in part to the disproportionate expectation on us to equal male success at work while at the same time carrying the weight of domestic chores at home.
‘Women have reached breaking point because of these pressures, but it’s still taboo to talk about female rage because it is a threat to conventionally “feminine” characteristics such as niceness and likeability,’ says chartered psychologist Catherine Hallissey — who adds that, as a result, ‘we tend to suppress anger which may come out covertly as passive aggression’.
My anger can at times feel a little like an irritating rash, making me almost twitch with discomfort. Like, say, when I’m multitasking — ie, trying to do ten things at once, and failing miserably to achieve even one of them properly.
Sometimes the rage whooshes forward like a fusillade, and it’s all I can do to grit my teeth and hope I don’t implode or, even worse, externally unleash the wrath within.
The latter very nearly happened recently while immersed in post new year traffic. I was so busy mentally making to-do lists for my children, parents, pets and lastly myself that I didn’t notice my car rolling forward and... SMASH!... I had rear-ended the car in front of me, the thud and discernible crunch of metal confirming the addition of one more chore and financial stressor to my exhaustive inventory.
I wanted to roar. Scrap that, I wanted to punch something — and not just the woman in the car behind who asked me to move my car while I was exchanging my insurance details.
No, I wanted to rampage through the streets and smash the town to pieces, King Kong-style, bellowing from the top of my lungs to all and sundry that I had HAD ENOUGH.
The car dent — while undoubtedly my fault — was the final straw in what seemed like a series of unfortunate events that represented my life over the last couple of years.
I was sick of holding in my fury, so I bring all of this dark energy with me to Unit 5 in Kylemore in Ballyfermot. The owner of the rage room, 25-year-old Lukas Baltrusis, greets me calmly from behind his desk. He’s clearly seen my type before — in fact, he indeed confirms that 90 per cent of his clients since the room opened in early
December are women. ‘Some people come alone, some are in a gang [three maximum allowed], they come in, dance around, laugh, have some fun,’ says Lukas, who worked in construction before destruction. ‘We even have therapists who have come in, they tend to do a double session, 40 minutes instead of the usual 20, as they want to try it out before recommending it to others.
‘We have people who laugh, who cry, who roar — everyone is different,’ he explains.
The room has been booked up since opening and it was no coincidence that it kicked off in December — with people coming in to have fun and thrash away their pre and post-Christmas stress.
‘We sold lots of vouchers for Christmas actually,’ adds Lukas on this most thoughtful gift trend of peace through rage release.
As a safety measure, Lukas uses monitors to survey the wreckage happening in the nearby contained space. He says that, on occasion, he has had to intervene.
There are rules in place before you enter the zone and get your
‘We have people who laugh, who cry, who roar’
hands on the weaponry — though they are pretty much common sense, with advice on not hitting yourself or swinging at others.
Handing me a protective visor to shield my face and eyes from flying glass and debris, I also put on protective PPE — ie, a bright red boiler suit — along with level-five cut-proof gloves. I’m feeling bad ass already, and I haven’t even picked up a blunt object.
Before you enter the stronghold room, there are a variety of devices hanging on the wall that can be used to eviscerate your prey. Choose from a hammer, mallet, wooden or metal bat, monkey wrench, or why not go the whole hog and try them all out for size?
I’m instinctively drawn to the blue, long-handled baseball bat which, when teamed with my brightly coloured boilersuit, possibly makes me look like Piggy, the psychotic porcine from Roblox.
Lukas places a crate of empty beer bottles and jam jars beside me and points to the grey wall opposite. I understand.
Every visitor to the rage room receives a large batch of glassware or crockery to hurl at the aforementioned wall. You can even bring your own items to destroy, Lukas tells me, anything from crockery to glassware, VHS tapes to small electrical items.
‘The largest items we can allow customers to bring along are printers, monitors and TVs,’ he says. ‘I’ve seen a few people bring in framed pictures to smash.’ This I can understand.
He adds that they get a lot of donations to be destroyed and all carnage goes to recycling.
Then, he produces the fattened calf of this slaughterhouse — an old printer and photocopier machine, which looks suspiciously similar to the one in my office that I can never work. It’s perfect, I tell him. One more bit of housekeeping before the storm — Lukas wants to know what music I would like as the soundtrack to my venting.
‘Taylor Swift,’ I answer quickly, to my own surprise.
It turns out I still haven’t got over the trauma of not being able to get tickets for my daughters for her
Dublin gigs in June. Lukas exits and Karma comes on. All of a sudden, I feel a little awkward and uncomfortable with the whole concept — after all, I’ve spent my entire life so far trying not to break things, albeit unsuccessfully.
I start with the photocopier, tentatively at first, the first SLAM of the bat making a satisfying crunch as that blasted control panel shatters. There is something about the resulting glass flying everywhere that breaks the seal, and the next swing is harder. And the one after that, and again and again... The more destruction I create, the better it feels. Five minutes in, I’m like a woman possessed. ‘Sweet like justice, karma is a queen,’ Taylor croons in the background, echoing my vibe — I am still mad at her, but this is helping. My eyes widen with satisfaction as the machine flattens and warps with every whack. Being so destructive shouldn’t feel this good, surely? But it does — it’s exhilarating and intoxicating, and once I get a taste for it, I’m hungry for more.
The printer is now a quarter of the machine it used to be, and I feel like a warrior as my boots crunch over its detritus to get to my future fatalities.
I pick up my first bottle and fling it at the wall. Infuriatingly, it bounces back, unscathed.
Now I’m REALLY angry — and in the best place for it too — so I pick it up again and hurl it once more, this time with a brute force. I watch in satisfaction as it explodes on impact, shards flitting through the air.
I check my heart rate, 138 bpm, firmly in the red zone, and I can feel a sheen of sweat forming on my brow. It turns out being destructive is quite the workout, hard on the arms in particular.
Again, Taylor reads the room and Look What You Made Me Do comes on as I’m making light work of the glassware. The freedom and bold release are something I expected to feel, what is new is the hell-bent tenacity of wanting to obliterate every single object in that room until there is nothing left but dust.
At the small window, Lukas signals that my 20 minutes is up, but I’m not quite done. That printer is still somewhat intact, and I can’t have that. I switch weapon and attack, slamming my hammer into its remains in a frenzy. Lukas has obviously felt the mood change and alters the soundtrack accordingly, and angry emo rock music fills my ears — you can, by the way, also wear earplugs during your wrath experience — as I try to finally pancake the damned printer.
Five minutes later, I haven’t quite succeeded, but I’m spent — all that anger release is exhausting. I emerge, buzzing and breathless, feeling energised and giddy.
After my experience, I can understand why it’s so popular — in fact, Lukas says the rage room is going so well he’s in the process of opening another.
I can confirm it’s definitely fun but is it actually a healthy way to channel anger?
Sigmund Freud’s theory is that anger decreases if we’re able to release it. Yet some research has shown the relief we feel at giving in to aggression can be short-lived and only makes us more likely to be aggressive next time.
A study in which researchers created a virtual ‘smash room’ allowing cancer patients to break objects using a virtual reality device was met with mixed reviews; some enjoyed it, yet some felt self-conscious.
‘I can see why people find it cathartic when behavioural expectations are dropped,’ says Catherine Hallissey. ‘However, there isn’t clinical evidence to support the use of rage rooms on a therapeutic level.’
Far better, Hallisey says, to use high-intensity exercise to get rid of the pent-up energy anger causes before addressing our underlying feelings.
‘Anger is a Trojan horse emotion — the primary emotion is usually a more vulnerable one such as sadness or fear,’ she explains.
‘When you’re smashing things up, you’re not finding out what part of you is feeling threatened.
‘Ask yourself why you’re feeling triggered.’
Truth be told, I’m not sure I questioned much when I was in that room. All I know is, I went in heavy with repressed rage, and came out with a big smile on my face.
Now... I wonder if a monthly subscription is available?
O RAGE Room, €30 per person, book at rageroomireland.com
Once I get a taste for it, I’m hungry for more