21 Days of Being Enraged: What Women's Anger Is Trying to Tell Us

Every week, I see Julia at Zenden. Like one might have a standing date with a manicurist, I see Julia every week, year-round, to care for my mind, body, and spirit. She's both a talented healer and a lovely friend.

Her homework assignment for me this week was to write everything I'm angry about, every morning, for 21 days.

I can't say I jumped for joy at this assignment. Mostly, I like to focus on the good and to be grateful: whimsical things, divine intervention, and perhaps even all of the benevolent ghosts that live in my yard.

But this morning, I gave it a try. I sat down with my coffee and my notebook, fully expecting a blank page.

Instead, in my mind's eye, a ferocious lioness growled and pawed the ground, clearly with a lot to say.

The most confusing emotion we have

Anger can be one of the most confusing of all the human emotions, especially when we factor in culture and gender.

I often come back to a line from Aristotle: "Anybody can become angry — that is easy, but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not easy."

He's right. Sometimes we lash out at the wrong person at the wrong time, or over something having nothing to do with the initial reason we were pissed off. Anger lurks quietly until it rises up like a viper, occasionally biting the wrong person.

In my practice, I've noticed the women who insist they "never get angry" are often the ones carrying the most tension in their jaw, their shoulders, the space just under the ribs. The body keeps a more honest record than the personality does.

In Chinese medicine, we have a name for that pattern. Anger is classically attributed to stuck liver energy, what we call Liver Qi stagnation. The Liver, in this tradition, is the organ system responsible for the smooth, free flow of energy and emotion through the body. When that flow gets dammed up, by stress or resentment or things left unsaid, it doesn't disappear. It backs up. And you feel it: the irritability, the sighing, the headaches, the tight chest, the period that arrives like a thunderstorm. (I've written more about how Chinese medicine reads mood, hormones, and sleep as one connected system.)

The grief hiding inside "aggrieved"

I keep coming back to the word aggrieved. I know it has to do with being deeply discontented, resentful. But look at the word buried inside it: grieve. Like grieving.

Is sadness part of being aggrieved? I believe it is.

Underneath our hemming and hawing and resentment is often a wounded, sad part of us. This is something I watch happen on the treatment table again and again. A woman comes in furious at her doctor, her mother, her own body. But if you sit with the anger long enough, quietly, it almost always softens into something older and more tender. The rage was the bodyguard. The grief was the thing it was standing in front of.

That's worth naming, because we tend to treat anger and sadness as opposites. They're not. Very often they're the same feeling wearing different clothes.

Women don't have anywhere to put it

Here's what I think about most.

Culturally, we as women do not have many opportunities to unleash our anger and our discontent, save perhaps racket sports.

Young men punch walls. They practice Brazilian jiu-jitsu. They're handed a hundred socially acceptable ways to move rage out of the body. But we as women aren't given many places to unleash our upset. We're praised for being gracious, agreeable, easy to be around. So the anger doesn't go anywhere. It lives beneath the surface, and, I suspect, quietly causes all kinds of physical and psychological downstream effects.

We're beginning to understand what "beneath the surface" actually does to a body. Anger is a physiological event as much as an emotional one. In a 2024 randomized trial published by the American Heart Association, adults who spent just a few minutes recalling something that made them angry showed blood vessels that lost more than half their ability to dilate, an effect that peaked about 40 minutes later. Sadness and anxiety didn't do the same thing. Anger, specifically, tightened the pipes.

Now stretch that from a few minutes to a few decades of swallowed, low-grade resentment. That's the part nobody consented to.

When there's nowhere for it to go, does it turn inward?

This is the part I keep sitting with, and I want to be honest that it is a question, not a settled fact.

Roughly 80% of people living with autoimmune disease are women. That's one of the largest sex gaps in all of medicine. Autoimmune disease is the immune system attacking the body it's supposed to protect. Turning inward. Attacking the self.

I can't help but wonder about the parallel. When anger has nowhere to go, does some of it get turned inward too?

I want to be careful here, because the science does not say anger causes autoimmune disease, and I won't pretend it does. What the research does show is a real link between chronic stress and a dysregulated immune system. Under prolonged stress, the body's cells can stop responding properly to cortisol's anti-inflammatory signal, a phenomenon researchers call glucocorticoid receptor resistance, which leaves inflammation running unchecked. And large reviews now describe chronic stress as associated with the onset and worsening of autoimmune conditions through exactly these stress-hormone pathways.

Association isn't causation. But it's enough to make me take a woman's unexpressed rage seriously as a health matter, not just a mood.

Why we're so afraid to let it out

I've had women tell me, "If I start to cry, I may never stop crying."

Maybe, on some level, that's how we feel about our anger too. That if we let it rip, we won't be able to contain it ever again. So we keep the lid on and mistake the lid for peace.

But suppression has its own cost. The psychological research on habitually bottling emotion, what researchers call expressive suppression, links it over time to more anxiety, more depression, and lower life satisfaction, not less. Keeping it in doesn't make it smaller. It just moves it somewhere you can't see it.

This, I suppose, is exactly why Julia is having me write. Because the anger does need a place to go: to be dispersed, dispelled, discharged.

Give it somewhere to go

In my private practice, we talk about anger a lot. And I've prescribed something that always makes women laugh before they realize I'm serious: buy a carton of cheap eggs, head out to the woods, stand on an imaginary pitcher's mound, and launch, launch, launch egg after egg at a tree.

There is something about the throw. The wind-up, the release, the splat. It gives the body the thing the culture won't: a physical exit for what's been building. If we keep it in, it can genuinely harm us. If we move it out, it moves through.

You don't have to throw eggs. The point is to give the feeling a channel instead of a cage. For some women that's moving it through the body: the racket sport, the run, the boxing class. Rage is energy, and energy wants motion. For others it's the page, which is what Julia gave me, and there's good evidence behind it. Even brief bouts of expressive writing about difficult emotions produce small but real improvements in physical and psychological health. Fifteen minutes, no one else reads it, no editing.

Underneath all of it, the nervous system needs somewhere to land: breathwork, acupuncture, and a little daily nervous-system resetting. On the treatment table, treating Liver Qi stagnation is exactly that — restoring flow to a body that's been holding, which is why acupuncture reaches so much stress-related tension. And when the anger softens, get curious about what's underneath; often it's closer to forgiveness than to fury.

Report back

This, I think, is where Julia was pointing me when she asked me to spend 21 mornings writing about what makes me feel aggrieved. But I can already see its value, not just for my physical wellness but for having a relatively safe place to let the lioness say her piece.

She had, it turns out, quite a lot to say. I suspect yours does too.

So let me ask you what I've been asking myself all week: How do you handle your anger, your resentment, even your rage? Do you have an outlet that actually works for you, or is this something you minimize and try to forget about? And if you're doing that, is it actually working?

If you've been carrying more than you've let yourself feel, I'd gently invite you to give it somewhere to go. A notebook. A tree and a dozen eggs. Or a standing appointment on a treatment table where the stuck things are finally allowed to move.

Report back.