Reappraise your emotions

KANISA GEORGE

Our emotions are there; we feel them, and we sometimes acknowledge them, but some of us are hell-bent on not showing them. Why might that be?

Of course, there are a vast number of reasons why we might fall short in expressing how we feel, and the way we express live emotions might have a lot to do with unresolved past traumatic experiences.

There is an unspoken rule that impels us to bury our emotions and “simply get on with it” when things get tough. And truth be told, most of us do. Emotional suppression seems to be the ideal road to travel, as it often proves to be the path of least resistance for those who want to start a crying fest while shopping at Pennysavers or during a staff meeting.

For the most part, all of us are guilty of suppressing our emotions, for as one writer puts it, emotional inhibition allows us to cope. But it goes beyond that. Sometimes, we need to suppress our emotions to conform to normative values, for example, restraining feelings of anger in public. It is also a useful survival tool that we can tap into when the trauma we’re experiencing is too painful to process.

When we master the art of suppressing our emotions, we may find that the more problematic or emotionally exhausting the issue is, the quicker we resort to sweeping it under the carpet or, where possible, ignoring it altogether. This easy fix might work temporarily, but as we ignore our feelings, we lose sight of the need to effectively regulate our emotions, which can and sometimes will affect our overall health.

Emotional suppression happens when uncomfortable thoughts and feelings are pushed out of our minds, and our focus is directed elsewhere, leading us to forget our reality.

Sadly, we’ve been so versed in suppressing our emotions that we aren’t cognisant of the effects it might be having on our mental and physical well-being.

Scientific literature repeatedly establishes a link between suppressed emotions and physical health problems, so much so that emotional health is placed on a par with physical well-being.

Numerous studies show that suppressing your emotions has a significant physiological impact on the body.

While these studies show that temporarily suppressing your emotions has no lasting causes, continual suppression of emotions can have detrimental physical and psychological effects. These effects range from anxiety and depression to self-harm and suicidal tendencies. It can even lead to additive behaviour like gambling and substance abuse. Emotional inhibition can also have potent effects on the sympathetic nervous system (our fight or flight centre), which can affect blood pressure and lead to cardiovascular disease.

A 2012 study conducted by the University of Texas found a direct link between suppressed emotions and aggression.

In the study subjects were asked to control their emotions after being met with highly emotional stimuli. The results revealed that bottling up emotions can make people more aggressive, especially where focused effort was placed on suppressing the emotion. While we might be avoiding painful or uncomfortable emotions, the continued, cumulative effects of suppression can devastate the body.

The International Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research found that an ongoing reliance on concealing or suppressing emotion is a “barrier to good health”. The effects are so grave that people who bottled up their emotions even increased their chance of premature death from all causes by more than 30 per cent, with their risk of being diagnosed with cancer increasing by 70 per cent.

Of interest is the findings of a research study on toxic positivity. It revealed that well-meaning advice like “everything will be fine” and “it could be worse” can be just as unhelpful as our internal pressure to suppress our emotions.

What, then, do we do with our emotions? Well, instead of suppressing your emotions, practise reappraising them.

Reappraisal is a commonly used emotion regulation tool that involves reframing the meaning of a situation to alter its emotional impact. In other words, when we practise reappraisal, we temporarily suppress feelings but consciously return to them later to process them. Challenge yourself to accept and respond to your emotions. One writer believes that accepting and responding to an emotion entails noticing its presence, softening our resistance to it, tuning into what it's trying to tell us, and using that information to inform (but not dictate) our behaviour.

Practising tolerance is also an essential tool. Behavioural therapists believe that the more tolerant of our emotions we are, the less overwhelmed we’ll feel in our decision-making abilities regarding our emotions and the less likely we are to suppress them.

It’s not always easy to confront our emotions, let alone sit and really connect with them. But we owe it to ourselves to stand firm in who we are, even if those emotions might unnerve us.