Women top global charts for stress and anxiety. They also do more unpaid housework than men, sleep less, earn less, and are promoted less. And yet, for generations, the one thing they have been told repeatedly is to calm down and not express anger. So perhaps it should surprise nobody that women in India are now paying money to walk into a room, pick up a baseball bat, and smash everything in sight.

From Bangalore to Mumbai, Delhi to Hyderabad, rage rooms or smash rooms are increasing in popularity as conversations around mental health gain mainstream momentum. Rage Room India, one of the country’s leading operators, reports having served over 97,000 customers across its locations.

Why are women loving rage rooms?

The most immediate answer is exhaustion. Fifty-four per cent of female workers report experiencing work-related stress, compared to 45 per cent of their male counterparts. This is not a new phenomenon. The reasons are well-known and recorded: women are less likely to be promoted despite equal or greater effort, more likely to head single-parent households, and far more likely to absorb the bulk of unpaid domestic labour. When you carry that much for that long, something eventually breaks.

The psychological explanation for why women flock to stress relief activities like smash rooms is not simply that they are more stressed. It is that they have historically been given far fewer socially acceptable outlets for their anger. A 2024 study published in SCIRP Journal of Psychology found that women reporting negative social consequences of expressing anger is a consistent cross-cultural pattern, especially in traditional relationship structures. Research cited in the same study notes that women often doubt their own “entitlement” to anger, as expressing anger conflicts with the socially accepted idea of femininity.

Research has repeatedly proved that anger suppression is a physically and mentally costly process. When that suppression becomes chronic, it is linked to anxiety, cardiovascular disease, and depression. In short, society has spent decades teaching women not to show rage. Rage rooms offer a space where they finally can.

Related: Exhausted And Overlooked: The Making Of A Female Burnout Epidemic

The disproportionate mental load on women—the invisible labour of managing a household, tracking appointments, anticipating needs, and planning ahead—has been documented extensively. When combined with full-time work, the result is not simply tiredness. It is a simmering resentment that has nowhere to go. A plate hurled at a wall is, apparently, a reasonable destination.

The Indian context: Stress, stigma, and smashing

The concept of rage rooms arrived in Bangalore, Mumbai, and Delhi in recent years, and uptake among young urban women has been notable. Ananya Shetty founded Rage Room India, placing women’s emotional wellness at the centre of the enterprise. In a culture that expects women to maintain composure and absorb familial and professional pressures without outward distress, many women find strong appeal in a supervised, consequence-free space where they can destroy things.

Do rage rooms actually work?

Here is the honest caveat: the science on catharsis through destruction is more complicated than the marketing suggests. Psychotherapists, like Dr Sheri Jacobson, have noted that “you can smash and scream all you like, but it won’t necessarily address the underlying issues.” Some research even suggests that physically acting on anger can reinforce aggressive neural pathways rather than dissipating them. Rage rooms are not therapy. They are not a fix for systemic burnout, gender inequality, or decades of suppressed emotion. But they may be something else: a signal. The fact that women are booking slots to smash printers and crockery with baseball bats suggests something is very wrong with the pressure they are being asked to absorb and very underserved by the outlets available to them.

What this trend is telling us, loud and clear, is that women need help and superficial stress management techniques like yoga, therapy, mindfulness apps, and even rage rooms, are not enough. We need structural, social change, not another way to vent.

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