Emotions tend to get a bad rap in our society, usually when they are expressed in ineffective or unpleasant ways. Yet, they are a vital part of our existence as humans.
Emotions are information signals that originate in the limbic part of your brain. They are part of a highly advanced communication system that involve your body communicating to yourself and you communicating with others.
Here’s a quick, classic example. Let’s say you are taking hike, walking along, breathing fresh air, and enjoying the sights and sounds of nature. Suddenly, you notice a long, slender creature slithering in the path beneath your feet. Instinctively, your body responds: your heart races, your muscles tense, you jump back, freeze up, or run away. In this scenario, the emotion is fear. The fear cues you into the threat by sending the physiological responses through your body which lead you to seek protection. This is your brain and nervous system’s way of protecting you from danger.
Likewise, let’s say it’s late- you had a long day at work, feel exhausted, and just want to shut off your brain in front of the television. Your partner asks if you are in the mood for sex. And when you try to compassionately decline, you instantly see a look of hurt on their face. This look moves you to comfort them. In this scenario, your partner’s emotions of hurt communicated through the look on their face to get their need met (I.e. your soothing comfort to their pang of rejection).
As we grow older, many of us learn to suppress these emotions. Typically, we do so because we have not had success as we express our emotions and seek to get our needs met. We learn to start suppression emotions in order to protect ourselves.
Yet, over time, this short-term protection has long-term costs. For example, emotional suppression can require increased energy, taking a toll on physical and mental health. It can lead to stress, burnout, and disconnection from self and others.
In this post, I’m going to share a practical guide for how to stop suppressing emotions. Grounded with these skills, you can embrace them as the valuable communication system they truly are, use them to your advantage, and experience more harmony.
How To Stop Suppressing Emotions
We’re going to discuss the pros and cons of suppressing emotions as a coping skill and how to stop suppressing emotions. This framework can help you decide the best way to manage your own internal experience.
What Does Suppressing Emotions Mean?
Suppression of emotions is when we actively push or unconsciously avoid uncomfortable thoughts or negative emotions away from our present moment experience.
This can include shutting down, numbing withdrawing, or avoiding emotions through other activities are means. Suppression could look like:
- Numbing through scrolling on your phone, sex, food, alcohol, or substances
- Avoiding emotions by over-focusing on thoughts, logic, or explanations
- Distraction from difficult experiences through television, focus on work, etc.
Whenever we avoid our feelings, in one way or another, we are actively suppressing them.
Is It Healthy to Suppress Emotions?
At times, suppressing particular parts of your emotional experience is adaptive and healthy. Expressing every emotion as soon as we have them can cause problems, especially in social functioning.
If your best friend shares with you that their father was just diagnosed with cancer, it would make sense for you to temporarily suppress feelings of disappointment after a bad date. It does not mean that your emotions are not important. Just that it would be a bad time to express them.
However, if we over-use suppression strategies, we end up ignoring our own emotions and experience over time. This can have negative effects on physical and mental wellbeing.
Since emotions are informational signals that cue you into things like values, boundaries, needs, and emotional safety, making sure that we know how to access our emotions when we need to is crucial.
Plus, suppressed emotions eventually create internal dysfunction and health problems. Inevitably, we more spend time thinking about emotions that we try to avoid. There is also interesting research that connects suppression of emotions leads to physical health concerns. Like increased stress and cardiac risk, hypertension, and even earlier death.
How To Not Suppress Emotions
Let’s talk about how to stop suppressing emotions. Again, suppressing emotions temporarily every once in a while can be appropriate in certain circumstances. Yet, to care for our mental and physical well being, we want to make sure that we’ve got solid skills to prevent suppression of emotions over time.
Plus, we cannot selectively choose our suppressed or repressed emotions. If we want to experience positive emotions, we have to tolerate the negative emotions too.
Build Awareness
Many of us never received clear, detailed emotional education. Feeling emotions can be confusing, overwhelming, and uncomfortable. Expressing your feelings is a skill that needs to be learned.
Becoming education and aware on what emotions really are and how to feel emotions can help you in regulating your emotions.
Knowing that your emotions are valid, make sense, and have universal components we all can relate to is the first step in deciding you do not have to push them away.
Label Emotions
When you notice that you are comfortable, learn how to name feelings. Stating the emotion you are experiencing out loud, even if only to yourself, reduces the intensity of them.
Remember, emotions are signals. When the limbic part of your brain gets the sense that the prefrontal cortex part of your brain got the message, it can stop continuing to send it. Stating the emotion out loud is an effective, simple practice to become integrated.
Learn Your Triggers
Whenever you experience a difficult or distressing emotion, see if you can identify the trigger of the emotion. The trigger is the event or indicator that lead to the experience you are feeling.
Depending on the emotion, the trigger may not be so clear. If you notice a pit in your stomach of anxiety but are not sure what you are anxious about, take a moment to slow down and breathe into that pit to see whether you can make sense of the feeling.
Other times, the trigger may seem obvious. For instance, if your boyfriend breaks up with you, you might feel sad, alone and fearful. The external trigger in this case is the breakup.
Yet, there may be internal triggers as well. If your boyfriend breaks up with you, you might take in a message of rejection or be reminded of other times you were abandoned. The meaning you make of an external situation can also result in an internal emotional response.
Related: How To Calm Anxiety At Night
Connect To Your Body
Emotions are energy and they are expressed through the body. When you become uncomfortable, it’s important to start to identify where the emotions are triggered and stored in the body so that you can pay close attention to these places.
Here are some examples of where my clients have experienced feeling emotions in the body. Remember, your own experience may be different and is unique to you.
- Anger through heat across the body or tension in the face or chest
- Sadness as a heaviness in the chest or back of the throat
- Fear as a knot in the stomach
- Joy as a lightness in the chest heart
Sit With Emotions
This might be the hardest step of them all. To learn how to stop suppressing emotions, we have to experience them fully.
Once you have done work of slowing down, labeling your emotion, and marking your triggers and body responses, it’s time to sit with your emotions.
This is the part that can be uncomfortable. We literally have to feel and experience the discomfort of the emotions in order for them to release and go away.
Breathing is a useful tool in this step. You may notice that as you pay attention to an experience of anxiety and simply breathe into the pit in your stomach, it will slowly begin to soften.
But I have good news for you! Research shows that when we stop running away from our emotions, they typically only manifest as physiological symptoms for about 90 seconds, with the chemicals leaving your body after that.
Related: How to Process Your Emotions
Identify Your Need
The entire point of the emotional system is to connect us to a need. If you feel fear, your body is looking for soothing or safety. If you feel anxiety, your body may be looking for reassurance or comfort. And if you feel anger, you may need justice.
As you sit with uncomfortable emotions, check in with yourself and see if you can access the need that lies just on the other side of your experience.
Act With Intention
If your need makes sense or is reasonable, see if you can go about getting the need met! Maybe you need to ask your partner for reassurance if you are feeling insecure.
Other times, our body sends us danger cues and thinks we are unsafe when we are actually not, based on intergenerational trauma or past traumatic experiences.
For instance, because evolutionarily being in the “out-group” could lead to isolation and lack of resources, our bodies may send intense fear signals if someone does not like us. In these cases, it is worth acknowledging the usefulness of the fear while reassuring yourself that you are safe in the present moment.
Attend Therapy
The journey of emotional expression can be long and difficult, especially if you have been successful in suppressing emotions in the past. You may even wonder what is the point of expressing emotions if you’ve never had success or healthy dynamics in doing so.
Therapy for individuals can be a safe, supportive place to get in touch with emotions, learn to build tolerance for discomfort, and practice skills to communicate and get your needs met. You’ll learn how to stop suppressing emotions. Working with a professional can create the safety and structure to a process that could easily become overwhelming full of strong emotions on your own.
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