What Happens When You Suppress Your Emotions
When you suppress your emotions, you make a conscious decision to push those feelings down. You try not to feel them, and keep them hidden instead of processing and expressing them. The challenge is that suppressing our emotions can have both short-term and long-term effects on your mental and physical health.
Short-term effects of suppressing emotions may include:
- Increased stress: If we don’t release stress, it builds up in our bodies and may lead to us feeling overwhelmed, unable to relax, and constantly on edge.
- Difficulty concentrating: This build up of undischarged energy can affect our ability to stay present, to focus or concentrate whether it’s on a task or on another person..
- Physical tension: When we suppress emotions, we physically tense up our muscles. This can create physical discomfort such as pain in tension in your shoulders and back, headaches, stomach aches or headaches.
- Irritability: Considering all the above, it’s natural that suppressing emotions will lead to us being more irritable, and easily triggered.
Overtime, this accumulation of energy in our bodies can lead to more long-term consequences
Long-term effects of suppressing emotions may include:
- Anxiety and depression: Suppressing your emotions can contribute to the development of anxiety and depression. Anxiety is often a result of undischarged fear and worry, while depression is a result of undischarged sadness, hurt or even anger.
- Physical health problems: Emotions live in our bodies and they have an energetic charge. What we feel impacts our muscles, brain, nervous system and organs. If we suppress emotions, they build up in our bodies and can result in an increased risk of physical health problems such as cardiovascular disease, gastrointestinal problems, chronic pain, and others. Many illnesses are physical manifestations of unresolved emotions and psychological issues .
- Emotional numbness: In some cases, if we continue suppressing our emotions and avoid feeling any of the “negative” feelings, we may become numb. Numbness happens when we try to “turn off” feeling some emotions and as a result we struggle to feel any.
Suppressing your emotions impacts our overall well-being, especially if it becomes a habit and continues for an extended period of time. Unprocessed and unreleased emotions build up in our bodies and impact our physical and psychological health. We can begin processing suppressed emotions by talking to a friend or family member we feel safe with, writing in a journal, participating in a support group or sharing circle, or talking to a psychotherapist.