Pain as an emotion regulation strategy

For many years I have thought about creating rooms at workplaces where people could express build up anger, tension and negative emotions. 

A way for people to react and regulate their emotions. Hitting things, smashing things, and let it all out.

The most used and applied strategy for companys in recent years, is to target the parasympathetic nervous system, and get people to relax. Meditation and breathing with a focus on being calm is often the tools of choice,

Now more and more research are suggesting that we use pain as an emotional regulation strategy. And that is part of why some are drawn to massages as an emotional regulatory activity. And maybe that can also explain the use of exercise exhaustion, as in HIIT training, marathon running, spinning etc.

"The findings from these two studies demonstrate that, given the opportunity, participants will choose to use physical pain in addition to other strategies, like reappraisal or distraction, to cope with various sources of negative emotion. We further show that physical sensation in general, and pain in particular, are equally effective in coping with negative emotion. These results suggest a reconsideration of the dominance of cognitively based emotion regulation. We discuss the implication that benign physical pain may be a broadly effective and underrecognized coping strategy. "

Link : https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31486664/