Therapists say your urge to rage-walk around the block is a good one. Here’s how to make it count. It’s become such a frequent occurrence lately that it’s starting to feel like a ritual: I wake up, see or read some infuriating new headline, feel the sickly heat of anger start to swell up in my chest, and holler that familiar refrain to my household before bolting out the door and down the street, arms pumping, jaw set, mentally steaming.
A year or two ago, I might have joked I was going on another “hot girl walk.” We all know the term. It has inundated our social media feeds since 2021, when University of Southern California student Mia Lind coined it during the pandemic as a way to focus on gratitude and relieve stress. If you’re a woman and you’re strolling somewhere, boom: hot girl walk.
We were hot girl walking here and hot girl walking there, hot girl walking to the mailbox and down to the dog park. The “hot girl walks” women are angry. We’re looking around at the world and getting all worked up, and well, a hot girl walk just doesn’t hit the same when you’re filled with rage (because *gestures broadly at everything*).
So, might I tender the following suggestion? If summer was for hot girl walks, let fall be for “spite strolls.” I know that whenever I’m close to combusting, a rage-fueled loop does wonders. And according to therapists, my instinct to stomp around the block is actually a good one.
Easton Gaines, a clinical psychologist and founder of MindCare Psychology. Your sympathetic nervous system kicks in, adrenaline and cortisol surge, your heart rate climbs, and your muscles tense. We just sort of resume regular life, because life doesn’t really care about our righteous anger.
So, we respond to texts and answer emails. We unload the dishwasher (loudly, with fervor). Gaines points to what Emily and Amelia Nagoski, authors of Burnout, call an incomplete stress cycle: the stressor passes, but all that mobilized energy stays put.
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