Why and How to Share What You Feel (It’s More Important Than You think)
Emotional suppression, conversely, is when you hide your emotions from others5. Suppressing your emotions hurts you. It’s connected with having depression and substance abuse, higher negative emotions and lower positive emotions, lower self-esteem, poorer immune function, greater fatigue, lower life satisfaction, and less relationship satisfaction (even three months later)3. It’s also related to having poorer social skills and social wellbeing4. In fact, if you suppress your emotions, people who don’t know you are less prone to like you. You’ll also be less satisfied socially, have lower social support, and have poorer quality in romantic relationships.
It’s more complicated, though, because you can suppress your emotions by
- Suppressing the Expression of Emotion (reacting in a way that no one can tell what you’re feeling),
- Suppressing the Experience of Emotion (not allowing yourself to feel the emotion),
- Suppressing Both Expression and Experience, and
- Suppressing Thoughts of the Situation (not allowing yourself to think about the situation)6,
To put this complexity in perspective, even though suppressing the expression of emotion can help you emotionally regulate, suppressing the experience of the emotion or your thoughts about the event would not help with emotional regulation (Webb, Miles, & Sheeran, 2012). Also, you can express your concern about a new boss while also suppressing your concern about losing your job3
Expressing your emotions is important because it helps you shape other people’s emotions7. By expressing your fear and sadness, you get other people’s sympathy and desire to help8,9. Therefore, it’s important to know when and how to express yourself.
1. Know When to Express Yourself: Emotions are thought to have evolutionarily developed to help us solve life’s problems10,11,12, so it is imperative to use the appropriate emotion with the appropriate context, at least socially. To do better socially, you want to express positive emotions in a positive social situation but suppress anger in that positive situation. Expressing anger tends to hurt you socially, potentially because it leads to aggressive action4. Instead of allowing anger to be destructive, check out my post on how to make anger constructive. Even therapists need to consider the context when expressing emotion or having their patients express emotions. In 100% of the studies, the patient had better outcomes when both the therapist and the patient had positive emotions13, but therapists facilitating emotional expression only improves patient success rate by 30%, up to 65%14.
2. Express Through Writing: One way to express your emotions is through expressive writing. It works because creating a narrative of what happened helps you gain insights and understanding about it15 . Expressive writing can help you reduce symptoms from a chronic illness, help you boost your immune system, and help you have greater success in work16, 17, 18. It can even improve your physical health, psychological well-being, physiological functioning, and general functioning all of which showed improvement even a month after writing. All you have to do is write for 15–30 minutes at a time. It doesn’t have to be every day, but space it out between every day or up to once a month. It doesn’t even matter if you write about past or current traumas, but it’s best to give yourself the option of either18.
3. Express Through Music and Music Therapy: Another way to express your emotions is through music therapy. In a music therapy session with Emotional-Approach Coping, you may cry and approach challenging emotions, but despite the emotional turmoil, you will discuss your hardships. You’re likely to leave feeling better than you did before the session started19. One technique you might do in a music therapy session is songwriting. Music therapists who use songwriting commonly do so to achieve emotional expression in their patients 20,21,22, but there’s five different ways a music therapist can use songwriting. Those include fill-in-the-blanks, creating new lyrics to a previously composed song, creating a completely original song, improvising, or mashing different songs together19. These techniques can be adjusted and mixed together to match your comfort level with songwriting so that it’s not so overwhelming.
To put all of this together, expressing yourself emotionally is beneficial when done appropriately, but suppressing your emotions tends to do more harm than good. If you’re sad, then be sad. If you’re happy, then be happy. If you’re around people though, just consider the mood of the people you’re around if you can.
I like to think of our emotions as a cup of water. If you have a cup full of stained water (negative emotions), you won’t be able to clear that cup by letting it sit (suppressing the emotions) or by trying to fill it with fresh water (suppressing the experience of emotion by only feeling positive emotions). It’s not until you pour the water out (emotional expression) can you fill the cup with fresh water. It takes courage to express those emotions, and it will be difficult in the moment, but you will feel better (and be in a better place) afterward.
1. Rimé (2007); 2. Rimé (2009); 3. Cameron & Overall (2018); 4. Chervonsky & Hunt (2017); 5. Aldao, Sheppes, & Gross (2015); 6. Webb, Miles, & Sheeran (2012); 7. Niven, Totterdell, & Holman (2009); 8. Lench, Tibbett, & Bench (2016); 9. Marsh & Ambady (2007); 10. Ekman & Cordaro (2011); 11. Scarantino (2016); 12. Tomkins (1962–1992/2008); 13. (Orlinsky et al., 1994); 14. Diener et al. (2007); 15. Smyth, Nazarian, & Arigo (2008); 16. Frattaroli, 2006; 17. Lepore & Smyth, 2002; 18. Smyth (1998); 19. Stewart & McAlpin (2015); 20. Baker et al., 2008; 21. Derrington (2005); 22. Wigram & Baker (2005)
