Venting About Your Problems Actually Makes Them Worse. Here Is What the Science Found.

Someone wronged you. Your boss made an unfair decision. Your partner said something that hurt. The situation is still unresolved, and you need to talk about it. So you call a friend, or you find a sympathetic ear, and you go through it again. And again. They listen, they validate, you feel heard.

And then you hang up feeling worse than before you called.

If this has happened to you, you are not alone, and you are not imagining it. The research has a name for what went wrong.

Psychology distinguishes between two kinds of talking about problems. Co-regulation is when you turn to someone to feel less alone, have the emotion acknowledged, and gradually calm down. Co-rumination is when you revisit the same problem repeatedly, replay what was said, speculate about what might happen next, and keep returning to the feelings without moving anywhere. One reliably helps. The other reliably does not. The uncomfortable part is that from the outside, and often from the inside, they can look completely identical.

The psychologist Amanda Rose named co-rumination in a 2002 paper, and her central finding is one of the more interesting paradoxes in social psychology. Co-rumination simultaneously predicts two outcomes that seem to contradict each other: closer, higher-quality friendships and increased symptoms of anxiety and depression. The more you bond with a friend over shared problems and mutual venting, the closer you feel to each other, and the worse your mental health outcomes become. Longitudinal studies that followed participants over time found the same pattern: the co-rumination caused the worsening mental health, it was not merely associated with it.

For anger specifically, the evidence is even more direct. Brad Bushman at Ohio State conducted a study in which students were provoked by having their essays rated negatively. One group then hit a punching bag while thinking about the person who had angered them. Another group hit the punching bag while thinking about getting fit. A third group did nothing at all.

The result was the opposite of what most people would predict. The group who vented their anger directly ended up the most hostile and aggressive afterward. The group who did nothing ended up the least angry. Exercise only helped when it was not linked to the provocation. Venting did not discharge the anger. It maintained it, and amplified it. The catharsis theory, which has shaped popular advice about emotional expression for decades, does not hold up when tested.

The mechanism is not mysterious once you understand how memory works. When you retell a story that hurt or angered you, you do not simply describe the emotion. You reconstruct it. The brain reactivates the neural pathways associated with the original experience with considerable fidelity. Every retelling is, neurologically speaking, a partial re-experience. Research has found that co-rumination raises cortisol levels in the body. The stress response does not care whether the threat is happening now or being remembered vividly. It responds to both.

None of this means talking to friends is harmful. It depends entirely on where the conversation goes. A session that ends with both people feeling calmer and clearer has co-regulated. A session that ends with both people more wound up about the original problem has co-ruminated, however much validation was offered along the way.

The most useful question to ask before you call someone to talk through a problem is not “do I need support?” but “what kind of support am I looking for?” If you want to feel less alone with an emotion, that is co-regulation, and it will help. If you want to go through the details again, add new grievances, and speculate about what might happen, that is co-rumination, and the research suggests you will feel worse when you hang up. The friend who agrees that everything is terrible is offering solidarity. They are not, by that act, helping you feel better.

The next time a conversation about a problem ends and you feel worse than before it started, you now have a name for what happened. And a question worth asking: did that conversation move you forward, or did it just rehearse the problem one more time?

The answer tells you what kind of conversation to have next time.

Now you know. The question is what you do with it.
Marco Bellinari

Sources

• Richard Morrissey. When Talking About It Makes Things Worse. Amanda Rose co-rumination research, Brad Bushman anger study, cortisol findings.
• Quartz. If You Are Going to Vent About Your Problems, Do It Right. Co-brooding vs co-reflection, Margot Bastin research.
• Florida Institute of Technology. Vent No More. Brad Bushman, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2002.

A Note from Marco Bellinari

Thank you for reading. Every fact in this article is documented and sourced. You will find the references at the bottom if you want to dig further. I hope it surprised you at least once. That is always the intention.

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