Anger rooms: A smashing new way to relieve stress

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(Health Today Sunday 27 Vovember 2016)

Anger rooms: A smashing new way to relieve stress

Photo: Anger Room/Facebook

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By Claire Martin -

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Published: 2:05 PM, November 27, 2016

NEW YORK — When she was a teenager on the South Side of Chicago in the late 1990s, Ms Donna Alexander fantasised about setting up a space where stressed-out people could relieve their tension in a safe, nonviolent way — by smashing mannequins, televisions, furniture and other objects. She was confident in her idea, but she wasn’t sure how to turn it into a business.

Finally, in fall 2008, and by then living in Dallas, Ms Alexander began an experiment. She invited current and past co-workers to her garage to pulverise items she had collected from the curbs in her neighbourhood. “I would play music on my laptop and just let them have at it,” she says. She charged US$5. Soon, word of the stress-relief sessions spread throughout Dallas.

“I started getting strangers at my door asking if my house was the place to break stuff,” Ms Alexander said. “When that happened, I knew I had a business.”

Over the next few years while she looked for a suitable location for the company, Ms Alexander accrued a four-month waiting list. In December 2011, she quit her job as a marketing manager for a steakhouse to officially start the Anger Room in a 1,000-square-foot space in downtown Dallas.

The Anger Room charges US$25 (S$35.70) for five minutes of crushing printers, alarm clocks, glass cups, vases and the like. Prices rise to about US$500 for custom room setups. The most expensive setup so far has been a faux retail store, replete with racks of clothing.

Several other anger rooms have popped up around the world, including in Houston, Toronto, Niagara Falls and Australia.

The US presidential election increased business at some anger rooms. Stressed-out voters travelled all the way to Toronto from New York before and after the election, said Mr Steve Shew, co-founder of the Rage Room there. Customers wrote the name of the candidate they were frustrated with on a plate and smashed it.

At the Anger Room in Dallas, mannequins of Mr Donald Trump and Mrs Hillary Clinton were taking beatings before the election. Customers demolished two Clinton mannequins, requiring replacements. But Mr Trump attracted even more ire. “We’ve gone through at least three of the male mannequins that we have to dress up as Donald Trump,” Mr Alexander says.

Sessions in an anger room are meant to be therapeutic. But mental health professionals question the efficacy of rampaging in a faux cubicle or whacking airborne glasses.

“Although it’s appealing to think that expressing anger can reduce stress, there is not much evidence of that,” said Dr George M Slavich, a clinical psychologist and director of the Laboratory for Stress Assessment and Research at the University of California, Los Angeles. “On the contrary, the types of physiological and immune responses that occur during anger can actually be harmful for health.”

Dr Slavich recommends stress-reduction techniques that can be incorporated into daily life, such as mindfulness-based stress reduction, meditation and cognitive behaviour therapy.

Nevertheless, customers of the Anger Room have paid to re-enact a scene from the movie Office Space, in which the main characters, a trio of disgruntled computer programmers, beat a printer with a baseball bat. The company can also customise the workplace experience, re-creating a customer’s own office.

“You have a desk with a computer and phone, chair and a mannequin dressed up in a suit, uniform or whatever relates to their real-life issue,” Ms Alexander says.

Customers are provided with protective equipment that includes a helmet, goggles, boots and gloves. And they can pick out a music soundtrack — including classical, R&B, grunge and heavy metal — and an array of objects to swing.

“Some of our typical options are baseball bats, golf clubs, two-by-fours,” Ms Alexander says. “We get things like metal pipes, mannequin arms and legs, skillets, legs from tables. Sledgehammers, crowbars and things like that.” Off-limits are sharp objects and those that use ammunition.

The Anger Room accepts donations for its rooms from residents and businesses in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Its four employees also go out on bulk trash pickup days looking for crushable items. The employees build the rooms, filling them with the breakables, and do the postwreckage cleanup.

Customers have included executives at large corporations, including Hilton and Microsoft, Ms Alexander says. In the first year, the Anger Room’s revenue was US$170,000. Since then, she has received about 2,500 inquiries from other aspiring anger-room entrepreneurs, and she is in the process of drafting a licensing agreement for franchisees.

At the Rage Room in Toronto, 45 minutes of destruction costs US$19.99 and includes video downloads of the sessions. Customers bring their own music.

The Rage Room’s “date night package” is its most popular offering, Mr Shew says. And a favourite activity for couples is for one person to throw a cup in the air for their date to smash.

“People really love that,” Mr Shew says. “I guess because it has a bit of a teamwork element to it.”

The Rage Room grew out of a business called Battle Sports, a staging ground for a sport known as archery dodge ball. After the expansion, “there was a huge, huge uptick in website traffic,” Shew said. Specifically, web visits have jumped to 1,200 from about 400 a day. Revenue has also increased, and the company has fielded many inquiries from prospective Rage Room franchisees. So far, it has granted licenses to a handful of them for US$1,000.

Startup costs for such a business are modest, Mr Shew says. “All you’re doing is just setting up the room, reinforcing the walls, giving them a bat and crowbar, getting some smashing items and they just go in there,” he says. Add to that providing protective gear, obtaining insurance and finding a suitable spot for the business.

In the first several years, Ms Alexander struggled to find a permanent space. The company’s first location was near Texas Instruments, which became a source of breakables. But after the first year, the business outgrew the space. Over the next four years, it moved three times.

Mr Shew concurs that finding an appropriate space for an anger room is a challenge. Retail districts are not well suited to it, he says. “We find that most people have an easier time with more of the industrial warehouse areas.”

Another early obstacle for both the Anger Room and the Rage Room was obtaining insurance. Since it’s a new concept, Ms Alexander says her insurer “literally had to create a category for my business.” NEW YORK TIMES