Boxing is one of the ways you can control your anger and aggression levels. Martial arts are all about controlling yourself, even in hostile or annoying environments. That’s a part of the values they teach. Well, let’s examine whether boxing is good for anger.
Boxing is a suitable way to habituate yourself to control your anger when you want to get angry because it allows its trainees to release built tension. Essentially, you’ll be punching away your anger, literally, in the training itself. As a result, your aggression, violence, and stress levels will decrease.
Today, most people let their emotions control them. Whenever they feel stressed, they allow that feeling to spread through their bodies. Thus, the emotion decides the next action for them. Such an act is one of the worst things you can do to your mental health, as over time, listening to your emotions will decrease your well-being.
Today, our habits aren’t as much about our well-being. We’re addicted to being busy, eating junk food, and watching TV. If I were to listen to my emotions and let them decide my course of action, I wouldn’t have been writing this article, as the process is too tough.
And thus, controlling your emotions by releasing them—is the first right step. Because of that, finding a suitable platform you can use to ensure stress, anxiety, violence, anger, and aggression—won’t take over—is critical.
Before we dive into the article, I want to encourage you to read an article I wrote about the pros & cons of boxing. If you have the slightest of desires to lean it, do give it a read.
Why boxing reduces anger
For the first section of this article, I want to explain why boxing, and other activities, reduce your overall anger. Before doing that, let’s explain what is anger and why it happens to us.
Anger is an emotion characterized by negative feelings and resentment toward a person or a thing. Often, it is caused by a thought that someone has done you, or someone you care about, wrong. As you can imagine, too much of it can be bad for us, especially our mental health and well-being.
Boxing reduces anger levels because it involves various exercises and drills that release built tension and aggression levels. As a result, after an intense workout, you’ll feel calmer and more mindful. Thus, it’s not uncommon to see boxing trainees, who know how to be aggressive when they need to, be calm outside training.
All martial arts are essentially an outlet for their trainees. They’re a platform their practitioners can use to set goals and improve their mental and physical selves. But, they also provide this awesome opportunity to be calmer and less stress post-training.
Have a look at this study:
Martial arts apprentices turned out to present a statistically significantly lower level of hostility and of the general aggression index than combat sports athletes.
SOURCE
So, not only is that something that makes sense, but several medical publications have examined this phenomenon; so we know it’s true.
Is boxing a good way to release anger?
If you’re feeling too stressed and want to be calmer and in touch with reality, you need to work on anger management. You might not have any problem whatsoever. But, your well-being and overall mental health will improve if you release built tension and aggression. So, is boxing a good way of doing so?
Boxing is an effective way to release anger because it involves drills that force you to be as aggressive as possible. For instance, most training sessions will include you hitting a punching bag for an extended period. As a result, your violence, and anger levels—after training—will be lowered.
I always see my friends and family too stressed sometimes. I know they can improve themselves if they want to work on their stress issues. However, it seems as if they’re addicted to getting angry at things or people.
That’s one of the common concerns you see way too often today. The same way people get addicted to being busy, they get hooked on feeling angry. When that happens, their overall mental health, in the long term, decreases.
It can be fun and release happy hormones to be angry sometimes. However, when you do so too frequently, your mind will make that a habit. As a result, you’ll start getting angry at things that don’t matter as much. That’s when martial arts, and particularly boxing, come into play.
“The regular practice of martial arts could elevate mindfulness levels of practitioners and thus influence positively on stress management and therefore quality of life and well-being.”
SOURCE
Does boxing reduce aggression?
Your overall aggression levels say plenty about you as a person. You may be one of the folks who get too aggressive too quickly. As a result, people will stay away from you and act extremely differently around you.
Let’s examine whether boxing reduces aggression; if so, let’s see how.
Boxing reduces overall aggression, violence, and stress levels by being a platform that allows you to release built tension through physical exercise. Therefore, with consistent and dedicated training, you’ll experience your baseline stress and violence levels decrease—in the long-term.
If you happen to have anger-management issues, it’ll be best to partake in various physical exercises. They can be both intense and mild. As a result, you’ll ensure you release everything that’s building up in you—on the particular drill you’re doing.
As you can see in the table, martial arts practitioners have lower levels of anger, physical aggression, hostility, verbal aggression, and overall anger. That may be precisely what you to better your well-being and mental health.
Boxing, and all martial arts, even Tai-Chi—are effective in decreasing your baseline aggression levels. They can be precisely what you need to ensure you’re not too stressed nor angry outside training.
Too many individuals are addicted to being angry. As a result, the only thing they do is ensure people stay away from them as much as possible. That is the worst thing you can do to your long-term well-being and mental health.
Follow the link if you want to read more about the science behind why martial arts reduce overall anger levels.
Is boxing good for mental health?
Today’s society embraces mental health issues. As a result, rates of depression and anxiety are at their all-time peak. For that reason, we must constantly seek to find more and more ways to ensure we don’t allow that to happen. Let’s examine whether boxing is good for our mental health:
Consistent boxing training will improve your mental health because it’s a platform you can set goals in and achieve them. Likewise, you’ll be overcoming countless obstacles in each of your training session. Lastly, it pushes your mental and physical boundaries. All of these will, inevitably, result in better mental health.
Countless distractions are constantly around us. They’re everywhere, I mean it. Just examine what you did during the reading of this article; Did your phone buzz? Did your mind wander to anything unrelated to martial arts or boxing? I know it did because so did mine.
Social media is especially harmful for our overall mental health because it has conditioned us to constantly compare ourselves against others. Therefore, we seem to be unable to control our thoughts. Eventually, we must work to overcome these concerns.
So, boxing, and all martial arts, are an effective way to better your mental health. When you’ll face an opponent, you’ll be in what scientists like to call: Flow state. Your undivided attention is going to be aimed at what you’re currently doing. Essentially, no other thoughts will come into your mind.
So, yea, if you want to better your mental health, consider starting boxing. And, if you want to read more about all the mental benefits of boxing, follow the link to where I cover that more broadly.
Final words
Boxing has positively impacted the lives of many – as I’m sure it can do to yours. It has the capability of ensuring you never face another anger management issue in the long-term.
Some folks are addicted to the feelings of being stressed, busy, and even angry. We must face that issue and admit we have a problem before moving on. If you’re one of these individuals, I encourage you to seek professional’s help while starting your boxing journey.
You’ll be surprised at how much less stress, violence, anger, and hostility you’ll feel toward the world once you’re after a 2-hours session.
If you enjoyed reading this article, I highly recommend reading about whether boxing is a hard-to-learn martial art.