When Your Patience Is at Its Limit and About to Burst — How to Release Bottled-Up Anger

Swallowing what you want to say, enduring unfairness, smiling it off. The patience you've stacked up that way suddenly reaches its limit one day, and you feel about to burst — many people know that stretched-tight moment.

In this article, we introduce, from a calm self-help view, a way to ride out patience that has hit its limit without blowing up on the spot, plus handholds for letting emotions out before you bottle them up.

Hitting the limit of patience is natural

Patience is said to be, by nature, not a force you can keep up infinitely, but a finite one. If you keep suppressing for a long time, exceeding its capacity and hitting a limit is rather a matter of course. So you don't need to blame yourself for "lacking endurance" when you feel at your limit.

What matters is not trying to power through the limit itself by willpower. A stretched-tight feeling keeps its energy smoldering the more you press it down. Handling it in the direction of letting it out little by little, rather than suppressing, makes it easier to avoid the form of an explosion.

In the moment you're about to burst, take distance first

When you're about to burst, the surge of emotion has hit its peak. Hurling words in that instant tends to lead to regret.

So first, try stepping away from the spot for a moment. Go to the restroom, breathe outside air, drink a glass of water — just taking physical distance makes it easier to avoid acting on momentum. What prevents an explosion is not further patience, but making a "gap" of just a few dozen seconds. If you wait for the wave to recede, most words and actions stay within a recoverable range.

Before bottling up, write and release little by little

Behind stretching tight to the limit, there's often the fact that you've bottled up too many small daily acts of patience. That's exactly why, rather than coping after you've burst, it helps to release it often before it fills up.

When you've calmed down, try writing out "what have I been enduring" on paper or in an app. The knack is to turn your eyes to what you've been holding back, not to words that judge the other person. The reason Yurusen offers the small step of "filing" someone you can't forgive into a ledger is exactly this — so you don't just hurl the patience out, but set it down, for now, as a record. For more on the effects of writing, see also The Psychology of Writing Out Anger.

When you still can't hold it

When a state of patience at its limit lasts for days, or you can't sleep, or it disrupts daily life — don't carry it alone; consider consulting a professional such as a psychosomatic clinic or counselor. Devising ways to let feelings out is an important tool, but there is also distress too heavy to hold with that alone. Not overdoing it, and keeping somewhere to turn to, is also one way of protecting yourself.