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Punch a pillow. Scream in the car. Get it off your chest.
It is the commonest advice about anger, and it has been tested.
An old model of the mind treated anger as pressure in a container. Let some out and the pressure drops.
It is a good image. That is most of why it survived.
After hitting something to vent anger, people are usually:
Anger is not a fluid with a level. It is a state your body enters and stays in while it is being fed.
Acting angry feeds it.
Hitting something while furious is practice at being furious. Heart rate stays up, attention stays narrow, the story stays live.
Anger comes with a real bodily state — heart rate, breathing, muscle tension.
Anything that keeps that state high keeps the anger available, whatever you are hitting.
Things that lower the arousal rather than express it. Time. Slower breathing. Physical distance from what caused it.
Unglamorous, and that is part of why the pillow advice won.
Which tends to reduce anger?
Tap an item, then a bucket
Going over it, out loud or in your head, is a form of venting. It rehearses the grievance and keeps the state going.
That is the version most people do without noticing.
This is not an argument for swallowing it. Pretending you are fine has its own costs.
The finding is narrower: acting out anger does not discharge it.
Naming the thing calmly, later, to the person it concerns, is different from both venting and suppressing.
It is also the hardest of the three.
Anger is not pressure in a tank. Acting it out is practice, not release. What actually helps is letting the body come down first, and saying the thing afterwards.