Is it better to keep feelings in?
· Source: Gross & John, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2003
At lunch a colleague made a joke about your presentation, in front of the whole table. You laughed along. Your face stayed friendly all afternoon, through two more meetings and a slow ride home, and nobody would have guessed that anything had landed.
By evening the joke is still sitting with you. Someone at home asks how your day was, and you say “fine” out of habit. Keeping it in feels grown-up, even polite. It also seems to cost something, and it’s fair to ask whether there’s a better way to carry a moment like this.
Two habits, measured over years of ordinary life
Gross and John weren’t studying one bad afternoon. They wanted to know what people tend to do with their emotions day after day. Across five studies they built short questionnaires for two habits, then looked at how each habit fits with the rest of a person’s life: their moods, their friendships, their sense of how things are going.
The first habit is suppression. You keep the feeling from showing: steady voice, still face, a laugh where a wince would be. The second is reappraisal, and it works earlier. You go back to the situation and change how you read it, so the feeling itself shifts before it needs hiding.
Most of us probably do both at different moments. That part is our guess, not a finding. What the researchers measured was the leaning, the habit a person reaches for most often.
What went along with holding it in
People who held their feelings in out of habit felt fewer good emotions and showed fewer of them. The unpleasant feelings didn’t shrink to match. These same people reported feeling more of them.
That’s the part worth sitting with. Keeping a straight face hid the feeling from others. It didn’t make it smaller on the inside, and it seems to have taken some of the pleasant feelings down with it. In the same set of studies, the suppression habit also went with worse relationships and with lower well-being overall.
What went along with looking again
Reappraisers showed the opposite pattern. They felt and expressed more positive emotion and felt less negative emotion. Their relationships went better, and their well-being was higher.
Reappraisal isn’t pretending that something bad was good. It’s checking whether there’s another honest way to read what happened. The colleague’s joke could be a dig. It could also be a clumsy way to fill a silence, or a sign that he’s nervous about his own slides next week. Nobody asks you to pick the kindest version. You only need to notice that the first version isn’t the only one on the table.
A link between habits, not proof of a cause
These five studies compared people with one another. What they show is that certain habits and certain lives tend to go together. Which comes first, they can’t say. Someone whose life is harder might hold more in because of it, rather than the other way round.
To see cause and effect you need an experiment, and Gross had already run one. In it, Gross showed 120 people a disgusting film. One group was told to think about the film in a way that would let them feel nothing. Another was told to behave so that anyone watching couldn’t tell they felt anything. A third group simply watched.
Both instructions reduced what showed on people’s faces. Only the rethinking group actually felt less disgust. In the hiding group, the body’s fight-or-flight system, which researchers call sympathetic activation, went up instead. From the outside, the two groups looked equally calm, and only one of them was.
What a straight face does to a conversation
Hiding a feeling also changes the person you’re talking to. Butler and colleagues paired women who had never met and asked them to discuss an upsetting topic. One woman in each pair was assigned to hide her emotional reactions, to respond naturally, or to rethink the topic so she’d react less.
Only hiding made the talk worse. It disrupted the flow of the conversation and raised the blood pressure of the partner, the woman who hadn’t been asked to do anything. In a second study, hiding also made the hiders themselves feel worse, pushed up blood pressure on both sides and cut the rapport between two people who were just getting to know each other.
These were strangers in a lab, not a couple at the kitchen table, so treat it as a hint rather than a rule. Still, a fixed smile is less private than it feels. The person across from you may be the one who picks up the tension.
Looking again, without forcing it
The suggestions below are ours. They lean on these findings, but no study here tested them.
There are times when keeping your face still is the sensible choice: a meeting, a client, a child who needs you calm. The trouble the research points to is the habit of never coming back to the feeling. So come back to it later, when you’re alone and the moment has passed.
Start by saying plainly what happened and what you felt. Then ask one question: how else could this be read? Try to find two other readings, and keep whichever one fits the facts best. You don’t have to land on a happy version. “He was mean” can stay on the list next to “he was nervous”. Having a second reading at all loosens the grip of the first.
Here is an invented example. Mira kept smiling when her sister criticised her cooking at a family dinner. At home she says it out loud: “I felt embarrassed and a bit angry. She said the soup was bland in front of everyone.” Then she looks for other readings. Her sister has been stressed about her new job. She also always comments on food, including her own. Neither reading makes the comment pleasant. Both make it smaller, and Mira decides it isn’t worth a fight, which she couldn’t have decided while she was still swallowing it.
If no other reading comes, that’s information too. Some situations really are as bad as they first looked, and then the useful question shifts to what you want to do about it.
When holding it in has become the default
A feeling you keep to yourself for one evening is ordinary. It’s different when you notice that you’ve stopped telling anyone anything for months, or that feelings come out sideways, as sudden tears or a temper you don’t recognise. If that sounds familiar, a therapist or your family doctor is a good next step. Changing a long-standing way of handling emotions is easier with help than alone.
A diary can show you how often you swallowed something and what it was about. That record is useful to bring to a professional. It isn’t a replacement for one.
Try it tonight
- Tonight, pick one moment today when you kept a feeling off your face.
- Say plainly what happened and what you felt, in two or three sentences.
- Then ask how else that moment could be read, and say one other honest version out loud.
Tell Halflight the moment and the other way of seeing it. It writes both down under today’s date, so later you can see which reading held up.