I’m not a spiritual person, but I consider myself blessed that most of my “problems” are really just first-world annoyances. Like the time this summer when our septic pump died the same week as our air conditioning. Or when our accountant dropped the ball on our federal tax returns, costing us hundreds in interest and late fees.
Whenever such trivial woes get under my skin, I remind myself that I’m among the lucky minority of humans on Earth with indoor plumbing, climate control and taxable income. And yet I’m not immune to petty rage. When some kid ran a red light recently and nearly T-boned my car, then flipped me the bird for honking at him, I felt a brief but intense urge to put a nine iron through his windshield.
I didn’t — and wouldn’t. But when an editor asked if I’d be interested in writing about Break Room, a new experiential business in South Burlington, I replied, “Is this a trick question?”
For the uninitiated, Break Room is part of a not-so-new global craze whereby people pay money to smash stuff without consequences. Each person or group gets a private room outfitted with fragile objects — wine glasses, dinner plates, household appliances, car parts — as well as implements of destruction, such as crowbars, golf clubs and baseball bats. For up to an hour, you get to move fast and break things, then leave the cleanup to the staff.
Smash rooms, aka rage rooms, wreck rooms or anger rooms, are believed to have started in Japan in the late 2000s before spreading worldwide. There are now hundreds throughout the U.S.; Break Room, which opened in early October in a former Denny’s, is Vermont’s first.
Mental health professionals disagree as to whether such controlled demolition encourages future aggression or reduces stress via a healthy aerobic outlet. For most people, smash rooms are just good, clean — OK, messy — fun. And for some, the act of obliterating dishes and glassware helps them cope with emotionally shattering traumas from their past.
On a recent Friday night, I visited Break Room with my 16-year-old daughter, Manya, and 13-year-old son, Ezra. Both had seen smash rooms on TikTok and were eager to try one.
We were greeted by co-owner Kerry Lyons, 49, who cofounded Break Room with his partner, Kristin Cutler, 43. For Father’s Day last year, the Milton couple visited a smash room in Connecticut with their kids, now 18, 16 and 12. At the time, they were struggling to find group activities that the whole family would enjoy. After exhausting the usual options — bowling, miniature golf, laser tag, escape rooms — the smash room proved to be a hit.
Realizing that Vermont had none, Lyons and Cutler spent the next year visiting other smash rooms around the country and talking to owners about what worked and what didn’t. (Lyons and Cutler eschew the term “rage room,” due to its hostile connotations.) Several business owners offered to sell them a franchise, but the native Vermonters wanted to do things their own way and keep the money local, occasionally running fundraisers for area nonprofits.
For my family’s first visit, we started with the 20-minute “Clean Break” package. For $30 per person, each of us got a tub of 10 breakable objects. Packages range up to the $100-per-person “Breaking Point,” a 50-minute session with 10 individual breakables and 20 of varying sizes to share — including a car part. Lyons and Cutler source these objects from garage sales, secondhand stores, donations and even roadside trash piles.
After I signed the requisite waivers acknowledging that, yes, broken glass is sharp and sledgehammers can break bones, Lyons outfitted us with coveralls, safety goggles, face masks and puncture-resistant gloves. If we’d had friends along who weren’t participating, they could have watched our mayhem on a TV monitor outside our room. Lyons even invited us to pick our own soundtrack.
“What kind of music am I allowed to play? Like, with swearing?” Manya asked, practically giddy with excitement. Though our photographer suggested Limp Bizkit’s “Break Stuff,” Manya instead chose Cash Cobain’s “some shit,” a slow-roll hip-hop song with, like, plenty of swearing and shit.
After Lyons explained the rules — no pounding on the walls, doors or floor; don’t throw straight down but away from you; and take turns so no one gets whacked — we busted loose.
Ezra started with a sledgehammer, obliterating a water glass in a single stroke. Manya went next, putting a crowbar to a pint glass, while I walloped a brandy snifter with an aluminum bat. Within minutes, glass shards were flying everywhere and we were all working up a sweat.
As we burned through our tubs of breakables, we yearned to pulverize even bigger and more satisfying objects. Only later did Lyons mention that we could have brought our own, with some notable restrictions. Due to state environmental laws, fluorescent bulbs, old vacuum-tube TV sets or other objects containing hazardous materials such as mercury and lead aren’t allowed. (Break Room also won’t let you smash vacuum cleaners — too much dust to clean up — or printers, which would send toner everywhere.)
That said, customers itching for a paint fight can book time in the Paint Room. There, participants get full protective wear, trays of fluorescent paints, brushes, a canvas and even paint-filled squirt guns. Next door is a sound-muffled Scream Room, for those who want to howl at the moon, their boss or their ex.
The three of us stood above a mangled mess of glass, plastic and electronics, pounding away like neanderthals slaughtering a mastodon.
Once all our breakables were gone, and sensing that my kids were still hungry, I ordered off the à la carte menu.
“Um, can we get a flat-screen TV, please?” I asked Lyons, as though requesting a second plate of nachos. He happily obliged, dragging one in from the supply closet.
We plugged in the TV — evidently, I missed the part of the waiver that mentions shock hazards — and positioned it atop a wooden table. Manya slammed the monitor with the sledgehammer, sending multicolored tendrils spiderwebbing across the screen.
“Oh, my God. It still works!” she said.
Ezra jumped in, clawing at the screen with a crowbar while I drilled it with the bat. Within seconds, the three of us stood above a mangled mess of glass, plastic and electronics, pounding away like Neanderthals slaughtering a mastodon. When there was nothing left to crush into tinier bits, we exited the room, sweaty but exhilarated and bursting with ideas for future smash-worthy objects.
“A car door would be cool. Or a windshield,” Ezra mused.
“The TV was fun,” Manya added, “but if we had, like, actual furniture or something like that, that’d be really cool.”
Clearly, my kids weren’t the first to imagine it. As Lyons explained later, some corporate clients have requested full office setups, complete with desks, phones, coffee mugs and computers. In other cases, couples have asked for dining room place settings for their date night. And lest anyone feel guilty about adding to Vermont’s sole landfill, all broken objects are separated into recyclables, e-waste and general trash.
Not everyone comes to Break Room for the same reasons. One woman brought items that her mother-in-law kept dumping at her house. Another woman let loose on some of her ex-husband’s belongings, which he had left behind after their divorce.
“We’ve had a couple of very emotional people in there saying, ‘Please turn off the TV. I’m kind of going through stuff,’” Cutler recalled.
One such “powerful moment” happened shortly after Break Room opened, Lyons added. A woman came in by herself, smashed a bunch of things, then sat down in the waiting area and wept for 45 minutes. She then proceeded to share stories of her childhood traumas.
Neither Cutler, a dental assistant, nor Lyons, a former bank manager, are therapists. For this reason, they met recently with a representative from Howard Center in Burlington, who provided them with pamphlets to give patrons who may need more structured mental health care.
“We know we’re not trained to handle it,” Lyons said. “But we want to be able to point them in the right direction.”
Lyons and Cutler said they’ve also had customers whose therapists suggested they try Break Room. And a few therapists have come in themselves and said they would recommend it to their clients.
Sometimes a Break Room patron finds something they want to keep rather than destroy. The day before I arrived, a customer found a champagne flute with a year printed on it. Because it coincided with the year of her brother’s death, she took it home.
How therapeutic are smash rooms? Even experts seem divided on the question.
“Here is the problem,” Kevin Bennett, a psychology professor at Penn State University, wrote in a 2017 Psychology Today story titled “Rage Rooms Not a Good Idea.” “When you spend time thumping an inanimate object, like a pillow, or beating nonliving things in a rage room, you are conditioning yourself to quickly become aggressive next time your anxiety levels rise.”
But author and journalist Gina DeMillo Wagner, who survived an assault as a child, had a decidedly different takeaway after trying a smash room herself.
“I felt a type of strength and energy I hadn’t experienced before,” she wrote in Psychology Today in April. “It was as if I’d opened up a new pathway in my body and allowed the 5-year-old version of me to be seen.”
“After the session,” she added, “I felt exhausted but peaceful, like I’d released decades of pent-up frustration. That night, I slept more soundly than I had in a long time.”
It wasn’t lost on me that what a man found problematic, a woman found cathartic and liberating. And given the highly divisive and frustrating nature of American politics today, it won’t be surprising if Vermont’s Break Room soon becomes all the rage.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Going for Broke | At South Burlington’s Break Room, busting stuff, screaming and hurling paint is messy and cathartic fun”
This article appears in Nov 5-11 2025.
