What Happens When We Suppress Our Emotions?

Amy Taylor June 12, 2013

Every day, we feel diverse kinds of emotions – sadness, happiness, fear, excitement, anxiety, and so on. All these emotions play a vital role in our well-being. But for different reasons, most of us choose to suppress some of these emotions, particularly the negative ones. Maybe because we feel overwhelmed or uncomfortable with them, or we simply don’t want others to know. If you feel like pushing it away from your head, it’s most likely that you are suppressing your emotion.

What is emotional suppression?

Emotional suppression is a kind of emotion regulation strategy that we do to make uncomfortable thoughts and feelings more manageable. We employ different methods to suppress our emotions – some are good, some are bad. For instance, there are people who resort to drugs and alcohol to get rid of painful emotions. However, it has negative consequences on health and well-being in the long run.

One of the most common methods of emotional suppression is to just shut down or eliminate the thoughts and feelings from our mind. Many people think it’s safe and effective. What they don’t realise is that these negative emotions don’t actually disappear. Rather, they go deeper into our brains. And over time, just a single emotional trigger could cause us to explode.

Can we really suppress our emotions?

According to James Gross, a scientist who studied emotions, suppressing emotions is difficult to do. In fact, it doesn’t even work. He said people have to work hard to shut down their emotion once it is up and running. In fact, the more we try to suppress it, the more we feel tensed and agitated. And the more we experience this, the more we put ourselves at risk of high blood pressure, depression, anxiety disorder, and many other health problems.

Here’s the thing – our emotions tend to erupt even before they could get noticed by our brain. We call it impulses. For example, when we are angry at someone, even if we deny our feelings, it becomes difficult for us to act politely towards that person. We would rather keep our distance and as much as possible, avoid conversing with him or her. But if that person asks us if there’s something wrong, most of us might say “No, nothing is wrong” although deep inside, we know something is not right (that person can tell too).

Why can’t we just hide our emotions as we wish? Basically, it takes about 100 milliseconds for our brain to react emotionally – a timeframe that’s way shorter than the 600-millisecond period for our cortex (the thinking brain) to register this reaction. That means before you decide to either smile or frown on that person you’re angry at, your facial expression has already took action. It’s like pressing the ‘send’ button before figuring out your message has lots of errors.

The Consequences of Suppressing Emotions

Many studies have been conducted to understand the effects of emotional suppression. A famous research led by Dr Daniel Wegner examined what happened to people when they were instructed to push away thoughts of a white bear. For control, Dr Wegner and his colleagues asked another group of people to think freely of anything, including thoughts about a white bear. They found that those who had suppressed their thoughts ended up having more thoughts of the white bear than those who were allowed to think of everything! Dr Wegner called this phenomenon the ‘rebound effect of thought suppression’. This means the more you try to push away thoughts and emotions, the more they become profound.

So what does this mean for us?

All these scientific evidences tell us that there’s no point to suppress our emotions, thoughts or feelings. But of course, this does not mean that we should just say and do whatever words or actions that come to our mind. The idea is to confront our emotions and responsibly deal with them. So if we are angry at someone, maybe instead of avoiding that person we can choose to talk to him or her in a polite manner and try to settle whatever issues we may have against that person. When we feel sad, maybe it’s better to admit that we are and try to figure out the cause of our sadness so we can find better ways to overcome it. When we are mad, maybe we can just engage in positive activities that can calm us down instead of trying to shake away the thoughts that aggravate our feelings.

In life, we will always be confronted with negative emotions as much as the positive ones. But it is how we respond to them that matters the most.

Do you have more ideas for healthier ways to regulate emotions? Share them by posting a comment below.