How I found inner peace… by smashing an entire room with a baseball bat! Forget mindfulness. Overwrought women vent their anger in Britain’s new Rage Rooms

As I swing a sledgehammer over my head before slamming it into the dehumidifier with all my might, I think about how the machine broke within months of the warranty, leaving behind damp laundry that was supposed to help dry.

My thoughts drift to the fact that I’m on my fifth load of laundry this week, and I hit it even harder. Not that my kids have noticed, because they think their clothes are teleporting from the bathroom floor to the wardrobe. Wrap. Because in addition to working full-time, I am expected to keep the house tidy. Wrap. Wrap. Wrap.

Plastic shards fly and my heart pounds in excited, illegal triumph. However, I don’t lose the plot at home, but in a “rage room” – a designated space where you can pay to release pent-up anger by demolishing household objects.

Like most of us, I had a lot of stress last year. The cost of living crisis and increasingly toxic culture wars have put our collective minds on edge.

But the strain and strain of balancing work and family life has also taken its toll. When I take stock, I know I need to make more time for myself this year.

And I’m clearly not the only overstressed woman pushed to her limits. A recent study found that we are reportedly 6 percent angrier and more stressed than men, which experts say is partly due to the disproportionate expectation placed on us to emulate men’s success at work and bear the burden of take care of the household chores at home.

“Women have reached a breaking point under this pressure, but it is still taboo to talk about female anger because it threatens conventionally ‘feminine’ qualities such as friendliness and kindness,” says psychologist Catherine Hallissey – who adds that As a result, we “tend to suppress anger that can secretly come out as passive aggression.”

Certainly, as I vacuum, do laundry, and maintain constant parental supervision on various WhatsApp groups, I find myself seeing that none of these chores are as important as they are on my husband’s radar.

When I disagree with other people, like the customer who took the last cart this morning, I swallow my frustration and curse under my breath until the tension builds inside me like a pressure cooker and I snap.

Recent examples include shouting in our driveway because our car wouldn’t start, shouting at the linesman at my son’s football match and kicking my printer because the cartridge I bought a fortnight ago has apparently already run out of ink.

Afterwards I felt ashamed and disturbed – and my children, if they were within earshot, were mortified – but it was undeniably better that they had gotten it out of my system.

So I wonder if there is any merit in a rage room? My husband, who points out that he doesn’t exactly sit still either, absolutely thinks it’s a good idea for me to take out my anger on someone other than him.

The first known version of a rage room is believed to have been created in 2008 by the late American anti-violence campaigner Donna Alexander, who filled her garage with junk and charged friends £3 to destroy it.

“I started getting strangers at my door asking if my house was the place to break stuff,” Donna later recalled, who went on to open The Anger Room in Dallas. “When that happened, I knew I had a business.”

Hundreds have since opened worldwide, including Break Room in Los Angeles, where socialite Paris Hilton posted a photo of herself smashing a flat-screen television and what appeared to be a photocopier. “There’s nothing wrong with expressing a little anger,” she wrote on Instagram.

On TikTok, videos of women destroying objects in rage rooms attract millions of viewers – @vickaboox advised her 813,000 followers: ‘Block his number and smash a printer instead.’

That anger rooms are a safe place to express anger may explain why statistically the majority of clients are women.

Rage Out in Maidstone, Kent, which charges £60 per 30-minute session and advertises itself as ‘cheaper than therapy’, is no exception, says owner Paul Fisher.

His 15-year-old daughter Daniella inspired him to open his business last year after she wanted to visit a rage room for her birthday. He says his customers – or Ragers, as they are called – are “probably 60 percent” women.

This includes those devastated by divorce or recovering from illness. ‘F*** you cancer’ is one of many ‘affirmations’ customers painted on the chipboard walls of the rage room after the demolition.

Women come to bond with their partners – ‘couples who break together, stay together’ is another claim – and visitors include hen parties and harassed working women, one of whom has scrawled: ‘5 kids and being a teacher #besttherapyever’.

Recently, says Paul, 44, a woman who was “well into her eighties” came: “She couldn’t swing the baseball bat very well, but she was lovely.”

About 20 percent of customers bring their own goods to break, often to dispel painful memories.

“We’ve seen cups with ‘number one fiancé’ on them. We see large photo frames. You look at something and say “that looks really valuable”, and they say “yeah, don’t worry about it”.’

Other items are unsellable stock sourced from charity shops. In addition to my dehumidifier, I purchased a plastic ornamental garden owl that my husband bought to deter rabbits, but which broke quickly, representing the kind of wasteful clutter I hate.

There is also a tray of crockery and glassware on a wooden square table in the center of the room.

Another tray holds my weapons of choice – a baseball bat, two sledgehammers and a crowbar – and a speaker hangs on the wall to blast music. Songs about cheating are apparently very popular.

At first, deliberately causing carnage after decades of trying not to disrupt or offend feels counterintuitive. Paul says most women instinctively look through the caged window to the reception for a nod before they start.

It’s physically demanding: the dehumidifier takes twenty blows to crack the outer casing, and a crowbar to take apart the motor, and the owl slowly succumbs to my baseball bat.

My stomach muscles tighten and my nerves alert for flying debris as I summon every slight irritation and injustice of the past few months for strength.

The pile of dishes is easier, and I live out my fantasy of smashing the contents of my constantly emptied dishwasher to smithereens.

Similarly pleased is Ashleigh Thompson, 25, a copywriter from Oxted, Surrey, who has just demolished a George Foreman grill in the rage room next door.

As she swung the bat, she says, she thought about everyday things that she “would get angry about but would push aside — manspreading on the train, frustration at work.” It feels good.’

Smiley and petite, she was brought here by her fiancé Charlie, 24, a waiter, because she was “stressed and he thought it would be a good outlet.”

The theory, put forward by Sigmund Freud, is that anger decreases when we can let go of it. Yet research has shown that the relief we feel when we give 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” in which cancer patients could smash objects using a virtual reality device received mixed reviews; Some enjoyed it, but some felt self-conscious.

“I understand why people find it cathartic when behavioral expectations are released,” says Catherine Hallissey. ‘However, there is no clinical evidence to support the use of anger rooms at a therapeutic level.’

It’s much better, she says, to use high-intensity exercise to get rid of the pent-up energy triggers of anger before addressing our underlying feelings.

“Anger is a Trojan Horse emotion; the primary emotion is usually more vulnerable, such as sadness or fear,” she explains.

‘When you break things, you don’t figure out which part of you feels threatened. Ask yourself why you feel triggered.”

Nevertheless, as I look at the shards of the humidifier and the severed owl head before me, I feel strengthened. I promise to talk to my husband about assigning household chores, but also make it a habit to dig through our toolbox as well. To be sure.

• Jenni Murray is gone.