New research reveals that listing your grievances on a piece of paper, then throwing them away may make you less angry. So I gave it a try …

A lifetime enveloped in a benign, insulating cloud of oestrogen left me ill-prepared to be this nakedly, shockingly angry as it ebbs away in perimenopause. It is occasionally exhilarating, but mainly awful, being furious about so many things: the government, contradictory dental advice, inaction on climate breakdown, whatever cat keeps defecating at my back door. I exist at an exhausting, irrational rolling simmer that periodically comes to a head with me inappropriately venting, realising I’m being unreasonable, shamefacedly having a word with myself, then getting cross again.

Help may be at hand, however, according to research from Japan , which suggests that writing your grievances on paper then throwing it away may make you less angry. Study participants were deliberately angered by researchers criticising their work and adding gratuitous insulting comments. Participants then wrote down how they felt and either threw the paper away, shredded it or kept it. The ones who disposed of the paper “completely eliminated their anger”.

It’s the internal voice whose strict, unbending standards can make us miserable. But tuning in to it can change everything

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When I first became her patient, I heard everything my therapist said as a criticism. Almost every word that came out of her mouth, I received as a telling off, a character assassination or a low mark. I thought to myself: “I’m paying this woman to help me and all she’s doing is criticising me! How rude!”

Here’s a made-up example that has a lot of truth in it: if I lost my mobile phone and described my feelings of panic, she might respond with something along the lines of: “You crazy woman, can you not be more robust? How can you be overwhelmed by something like losing your phone? Can you not be more chill? More resilient? Thank God my other patients are not this basic.”

Manage your mum’s care from a distance. Don’t get sucked into her orbit

The question My father was violent and my mother emotionally fragile. I took on a parental role from the age of around 11, trying to manage my dad’s moods, keep my mum’s spirits up and take care of my younger brother. Mum often lean ed on me and I felt responsible for her stability. We were often punished in cruel ways. I was also abused sexually by a family “friend”. When we finally escaped our father, Mum moved this friend into our first “safe” home as her partner, where he continued to abuse me. As adults, my brother and I maintain strict boundaries and there is judgment from the wider family for this.

With a lot of therapy I have managed to forge a life for myself, which can still feel as though it shouldn’t belong to me, with a loving partner and warm friends. I have worked in a professional role for 15 years. Yet I struggle to feel confident and competent. I often fear losing the life I’ve built. I maintain contact with Mum, because I don’t want to hurt her and I know she doesn’t recognise how things were, but I don’t feel the “normal” feelings people feel towards their parents.

Marina Hyde with her take on Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson’s surreal US presidential bid (1m23s); Emine Saner meets the sociopath who learned to behave – and found happiness (8m05s); why Gen Z has fallen in love with Sex and the City (24m45s); and do our political opponents really hate us? (29m54s).

Readers respond to Japanese research on anger management techniques

Your article ( Write down your thoughts and shred them to relieve anger, researchers say, 9 April ) reminded me that, in the 1960s, after visiting a preschool group in a monitoring capacity, I felt aggrieved by the way I’d been received. On returning home, I wrote a letter to the person involved, but then calmed down sufficiently to decide not to send it. I screwed up the paper and threw it on to the open fire. I did feel better after that.

Fast forward to the early 2000s, while working with a bereavement organisation, my client expressed negative thoughts about a close relative who was reacting in a different way to their loss. I suggested he write down his angry thoughts and then destroy what he wrote in whatever way he wanted.

This absorbing exploration of nostalgia raises questions about its slippery nature, and shows how it has been chillingly deployed in politics, from the cold war to Trumpism

In the 1970s there were American press reports of an Iowa man who was tormented by his yearning for the 16-year stretch of time that ran from 1752 to 1768. His misery was the result of not being able to find anyone who shared this deep nostalgia for a period when electricity was still a rumour and America was proud to think of itself as British.

But does this really count as nostalgia? Is it not, actually, a bid for attention, a way for the man from Iowa to signal that, while his body might be tethered to the cornfields, his mind is free to roam in exquisite pastures where gentlemen routinely wear wigs and night-time travel is best reserved for a full moon? Agnes Arnold-Forster doesn’t say, but deploying the anecdote allows her to draw attention to the slipperiness of the very concept of nostalgia. Is it a legitimate and trans-historical emotion, like sadness or rage? Or could it be rather a cultural confection, a passing fancy expressive of a particular time and place (in the case of the man from Iowa, this would be Gerald Ford’s post-Vietnam America)? Most fundamentally of all, can you feel nostalgic for a time or a place that you never actually experienced yourself?

How can you change your life for the better today? Learn not just to appreciate happiness – but to anticipate it

Be honest: there are times when you have felt schadenfreude, or “delight in another’s misfortunes”. But what about v orfreude ? I recently came across this lovely word, which my German-speaking friend translated as “the anticipation of joy”. It struck me as such a hopeful concept – surely we could all do with less schadenfreude and more vorfreude . So what exactly is anticipatory joy, how do we cultivate it and will it make us happier?

“The idea is to find joy in the lead-up to an event,” says Sophie Mort , a clinical psychologist and mental health expert at the meditation and mindfulness app Headspace . “For example, we often feel joy and excitement when planning a trip, thinking about going on a date or anticipating a special meal.” It’s easy to look forward to holidays and special occasions, but a joy-filled life is also about everyday occurrences. Rory Platt, a writer at the personal development company The School of Life , says: “The trick lies in filling our calendar with lots of little moments to look forward to – like tiny baubles that, when seen from a distance, combine to make a more glittering future.”

The Harvard professor reveals how everyday rituals can help us cope with pressure, unlock our emotions and define our identities – but can also become unhelpful and divisive

Michael Norton studied psychology and was a fellow at the MIT Media Lab before becoming professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Known for his research on behavioural economics and wellbeing, Norton published his first book, Happy Money: The New Science of Smarter Spending , with Elizabeth Dunn , in 2013. For his latest, The Ritual Effect: The Transformative Power of Our Everyday Actions , out on 18 April, Norton spent more than a decade surveying thousands of people about the role of ritual in their lives.

Rituals seem a tricky subject for scientific study. How do you categorise them and measure their effect?
It felt very daunting at first, because you can’t randomly assign people to families and have them do different rituals, then follow up in 12 years. At first I was going to study obvious things like weddings and funerals, but when we surveyed people, we found that they had all these other things they made up – in their families, with a significant other, with people at work. That opened it up a lot. We could look at these kinds of rituals and see when people do them. We could measure their emotions, we could really start to get traction on what these things are doing in our lives.

A supermarket is using eye-tracking technology to find what messaging encourages take-up of unpackaged fruit and veg

With thick black frames and hidden cameras, the glasses look designed for espionage or the metaverse but instead the eye-tracking headgear is being deployed to get inside shoppers’ heads as part of the drive to cut plastic packaging from the weekly food shop.

It is an unlikely scene. Hooked up with the glasses a shopper is being tailed around a Waitrose produce department by a researcher carrying a large tablet that displays live footage of them picking up banal things such as potatoes, apples and bananas.