2 Beliefs That Prevent Us From Working Through Big Emotions

Reported by MindBodyGreen.

You have been taught, explicitly or not, to leave your feelings at the door. Don't bring emotion into the office. Don't let it show at the dinner table. Pull it together. What nobody told you is that this advice is not only useless — it's actively making things worse.

According to MindBodyGreen, psychologist and Stanford researcher Emma Seppälä, Ph.D. identifies two deeply ingrained cultural beliefs that keep us locked in emotional cycles rather than moving through them. The first is the fiction that emotions are optional — something you can set aside like a coat. They aren't. Research confirms that every person, regardless of gender, age, or culture, experiences emotion continuously. Rob Cross, professor of global leadership at Babson College, calls the relentless small emotional hits of modern life microstressors — the anxious text, the social media scroll, the screen-time notification — and his research shows they accumulate into a genuine physiological toll. You feel wrecked by 6 p.m. not because something major happened, but because dozens of tiny emotional drains did.

The suppression trap

The second belief is more insidious: that stuffing emotions down is a functional coping strategy. It isn't. Suppression is, according to Seppälä, simultaneously the world's most popular and most ineffective emotion management technique. The research on outcomes is grim — fewer close relationships, lower life satisfaction, impaired memory, and elevated blood pressure. But the cruelest part? Suppression doesn't quiet emotions. It amplifies them. Studies show that when you suppress anger specifically, brain activity in emotional centers actually increases, along with heart rate and blood pressure. You may look composed. Internally, you are a shaken soda can. The pressure builds until it either explodes outward or implodes — surfacing as stomachaches, migraines, passive aggression, or compulsive habits you use to avoid feeling anything at all.

The instinct to control emotional expression is understandable, and full-blown outbursts aren't the answer either. But there is significant space between screaming into a void and quietly pretending everything is fine. Emotions are energy, Seppälä argues — action potential — and unprocessed energy doesn't disappear. It parks itself in your body and your relationships and waits.

The work isn't learning to feel less. It's stopping the exhausting performance of feeling nothing at all — because that performance is what's keeping you stuck.

Read the original at MindBodyGreen.