In the face of negative life events, we can feel a wide variety of reactions including sadness, anger, jealousy, disappointment, frustration and loneliness among others. For some, feeling and expressing those emotions is difficult or unacceptable and they choose to avoid it by suppressing their emotions. They can do this by avoiding talking about it, distracting themselves or using substances (like alcohol or drugs) to numb their feelings.
Emotion suppression is a common, unhealthy but effective method at coping with emotions. It is unhealthy because repeated attempts at suppressing negative emotions causes excess stress on the body, contributing to various health problems like lowered immunity, infections and diabetes. However, emotion suppression as a strategy to deal with negative emotions is effective.
When people deliberately try to hide their negative feelings, most of the time they are able to do so successfully. However, what people don’t realize is that when you engage in emotion suppression, you not only hide your negative feelings but your positive feelings as well. Overall, people who are engaged in emotion suppression tend to behave generally emotionless, unable to express happiness, pleasure and joy in a conversation.
In addition, people who try to hide their feelings are poor conversationalists. They are distracted and have difficulty acknowledging other people’s communication attempts with them. This is because their brains literally are preoccupied with stuffing their emotions in a box and thus cannot pay full attention to what else is going on.
Interestingly, research is also identifying that the people who are in a conversation with someone who is suppressing their emotions have a spike in their blood pressure. This shows that it is physiologically more stressful to talk to someone who is suppressing their emotions than someone who is expressing their negative sentiments.
Emotion suppression is effective only for short bursts of time. Eventually, no matter what emotion you are trying to hide from will express itself in one or another. It may come out toward the intended target or it may come out in an entirely unrelated situation. Either way, emotions cannot be avoided so it is best to learn how to manage emotions properly so that you and those around you can enjoy each other’s company.