Life can be incredibly stressful and overwhelm a person with anxiety, stress, and burnout. It could come in the form of an argument with your kids, an unforeseen bill, dealing with a bad boss, or anything else. You don’t want to burden your friends with constant moaning about your life’s troubles, but it can get to the point where you just want to scream. If that sounds like you, join the club. No, seriously, you can join a literal screaming club.
A new trend is emerging worldwide, from Austin to Chicago to London and beyond. Meet up with others who are also having a rough time and scream as loudly as you can. These are called “screaming clubs,” and they’re forming new chapters in various communities to meet weekly to monthly, so locals can give a loud, cathartic scream together in public. Even if the screaming itself doesn’t solve a person’s problems, it seems to be bringing people together to make new friends who are also having a tough time.
“Even in that short walk to the point where we go scream, there is already communication and community being built,” said Manny Hernandez, co-founder of Scream Club Chicago, to People. “People are having conversations about where they’re from, how they got there, and how they’d heard about it. Everyone gives high-fives and hugs after, and it’s beautiful.”
Is screaming a good stress-reliever?
It’s not unheard of that screaming, whether it’s among a group, alone in your car, or into a pillow, can make you feel like something's been unloaded off your chest. But are screaming clubs truly good for your mental health? Or are they just a reprieve from inevitable stress or depression?
@itgirl0468 He really let it all out😭😂 #mn #screamclub #minnesota #somalitiktok #fyp
“Psychologically, these group scream sessions or events blend elements of community, somatic release, and primal therapy,” licensed therapist and clinical director Candace Kotkin-De Carvalho tells GOOD. “Screaming activates the sympathetic nervous system to be followed by a parasympathetic reset, which provides a temporary relief in stress, similar to exercising or crying. In moderation, the physical expression of stress can reduce muscle tension, lower levels of stress hormones, and create a sense of permission to express these emotions.”
So it does seem to be helpful, but Kotkin-De Carvalho warns that while screaming could help a person’s stress, it’s more of a supplement rather than treatment.
“Without reflection or integration of feelings and coping mechanisms, discharging these emotions may begin to feel repetitive rather than restorative,” she says. “Sustainable, long-term healing comes from combining expression with emotional insight and behavioral tools for regulation.”
Scream clubs bring people together
That said, Kotkin-De Carvalho thinks that scream clubs themselves are positive and could be helpful for a person’s overall mental health, for the social aspects alone.
@monsharx LONDON NEEDED THAT SCREAM 😱
“For many that participate, the laughter and human connection afterward may be more therapeutic than the scream itself. Overall, scream clubs can serve as a symbolic exhale for those who are overstimulated and overwhelmed in a safe, communal setting. The healthiest role of scream clubs is their complement to therapy to release pent-up emotion," Carvalho says.
So if you feel the need to scream all the time, it’s best to seek professional help and therapy to best address and manage those feelings. However, along the way, you may want to see if there is a screaming club in your area. It won’t solve the overall cause of your stress, but it’ll provide brief relief and let you make friends for screaming and non-screaming events alike.
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Pictured: A healthy practice?
Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.