How long it actually takes to stop being angry at someone.

Ask yourself how long you were angry about something, and an answer arrives quickly — a few weeks, a couple of months. Ask what that answer is actually based on, and it gets harder to say. It's a summary, delivered with confidence, of something that was never tracked while it was happening.

An open loop stays open

Bluma Zeigarnik's research found that unresolved, unfinished matters remain more cognitively accessible than resolved ones — more likely to resurface uninvited.¹ Anger attached to something that never received a real resolution, only a pause, can resurface indefinitely for exactly this reason. That's not a sign you're failing to move on. It's a sign the loop is still open, which is a more specific and more fixable problem than "not moving on."

The remembered duration is not the lived duration

Daniel Kahneman's distinction between the experiencing self and the remembering self applies directly here.² The remembering self compresses an experience into a story — "I was angry for about a month" — that captures salience, not elapsed time. How long you actually spent in some active state of anger, day by day, is a different number than the one memory hands you afterward, and usually an unflattering one to compare against.

Venting isn't the mechanism that shortens it

Brad Bushman's research directly tested the folk theory that expressing anger — venting — discharges it. It found the opposite in several conditions: venting anger did not reduce subsequent aggression, and in some cases increased it.³ If venting isn't reliably the mechanism, then the honest way to answer "how long did this actually take" isn't to vent harder or wait for a felt verdict — it's to look at a dated record of when the person or the incident stopped showing up in what you write, and let that answer the question instead of your memory of it. Related: why forgiving someone doesn't feel like you expected and the difference between venting and reflecting.