I was sick of talking about my problems – so I paid to smash up a ‘rage room’ instead

Shards of china are ricocheting off the walls. People are screaming. Teacups are flying. I’m energised. Sweat-drenched. Clear-headed. And alarmingly excited to smash apart the terracotta cat lingering in my peripheral vision.

Rage rooms are a relatively new phenomenon. Essentially, the idea is to unleash your anger by paying to stand in a windowless room and smash things to smithereens with a variety of weapons while wearing protective eyewear. There’s roughly one in every major US city and a smaller smattering in the UK, mostly on the outskirts of London. Their popularity is also growing, due in part to swathes of women on TikTok who claim they’d rather take a hammer to some dinnerware than speak to a man about their feelings ever again.

“Block his number and smash up a printer instead,” content creator @vickaboox advises her 800,000 followers. “Booking a rage room because doing this to his car is illegal,” echoes @shoukkapr, alongside footage of her swinging a sledgehammer into a red Volkswagen Golf.

At Rage Out in Maidstone, where a 30-minute smashing session costs £60 and their slogan is “cheaper than therapy”, their customers are made up of over 60 per cent women. “It surprised me, in all honesty,” says owner Paul Fisher. “As sexist as this may sound, I just always assumed it would be a men’s activity. I can’t put my finger on it. We’ve never targeted women.”

I first discovered rage rooms the way you stumble across most emerging trends in 2024: while scrolling on TikTok. Like many of the “zillennial” generation, I’ve been encouraged to verbalise my feelings using buzzwords like “boundaries” and “toxic”. But, after two rounds of talking therapy and a lifetime of being told not to “shout” by my dad if my voice reached higher than 50 decibels, there was something refreshing about the unapologetic violence in these videos. I was done talking. And, truly, the easiest way to market something to anyone under 30 is to make it Instagrammable.

Angry women on social media who sold me on rage rooms invariably had one common gripe – the modern dating scene, which Jennifer Cox, psychotherapist and author of Women Are Mad likens to “the Wild West”. Essentially, our love lives are so frustrating that they’ve driven many of us to destruction.

It’s bleak out there. Situationships (where they “like you but can’t commit to you”) require saint-like levels of patience in order to coax partners into being emotionally available. Meanwhile, the early “talking stages” we experience on dating apps are often so stunted it feels like a conversation with ChatGPT. And if you’ve finally found someone you like? They’ll probably ghost you within a week. “It’s an eternal cycle of disappointment, confusion and madness,” says Cox, who suggests there’s a jarring difference between the romantic expectations we put on apps and the reality of the “total charlatans” we end up meeting.

Political opinions (Gen Z women are growing more liberal while men dawdle conservatively behind) and differences in spending habits between genders have often been highlighted as the biggest affronts to modern romance. Yet Cox thinks something simpler is at work: ghostings and the boring conversations that lead to them stem from our generational inability to properly communicate with each other. There’s a reason Sally Rooney’s Normal People and David Nicholls’s One Day, where couples spend years struggling to express how they feel, have become the decade’s most resonant romances.

“From a very early point, girls are taught to become amazing at expressing emotions at a verbal level,” Cox explains. “Whereas boys aren’t getting that practice at all. It’s not expected of them. So it’s like you have two different species going out into the world.”

Not only can this leave many men feeling lonelier – and less inclined to chat through their feelings with friends in later life – girls who’ve been taught to verbalise their fury rather than burn it off in the playground can end up harbouring anger so deeply that we don’t even recognise we’re feeling it. Instead, when we feel fury, we cry.

“Women have been really gagged in terms of the emotional spectrum,” Cox says. “Almost anything negative is out of bounds for women because there’s so much shame around looking ‘crazy’. So, we sublimate anger at such a deep level we don’t even know we’re feeling it. We aren’t allowed to be angry, but we’re allowed to be depressed. We’re allowed to be anxious. It’s not that we’re not having these feelings. There just isn’t a space to put them.”

Fisher was inspired to open his own rage room in Maidstone in 2023 after his 15-year-old daughter, Daniella asked to visit one for her birthday. “When she got in there, she went absolutely mental,” Fisher remembers. “She was in her own little space. It just gave her that release to let everything out, without embarrassing her.”

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I get it. Post-rage room, you experience a distinct serenity. Dopamine is high. Cortisol is low. It feels as if you’re floating on the air of the destruction you just unleashed. Cox says this feeling is also far from something we should experience only after a bad breakup. In fact, she thinks we should be letting our rage out every day.

“Not expressing this stuff can [have] dire implications,” she warns. “Disease. Our organs suffer. Lots of inflammation occurs in our bodies when we don’t metabolise cortisol quickly and it’s allowed to stack up. It doesn’t have to be a rage room. Go on a really fast run. Do kickboxing or other martial arts. Smash a mattress with a tennis racket, or punch a pile of coats or cushions. Any high-impact and explosive movement is really good. Just make an impact with a surface to make that energy convert.”

That said, if your partner’s communication style is frustrating enough that it’s led you to book a date with a rage room, take a wider look at your choices, Cox warns – even if you’ve found new ways to de-stress, destruction won’t replace mutual understanding.

“Fundamentally, relationships in their earlier stages should just feel easy,” she says. “If it feels difficult and painful, call it a day. Think about your energy levels and what you deserve. You can try and communicate as much as you want but, if it’s one-sided, you’re gonna get nowhere. There are men out there that want better, too. They want that connection. Find them.”

But until you do, remember not to waste your time, either – it’s far more exhilarating smashing crockery against a brick wall than it is trying to talk to one.