Repressing your emotionsToday I was “digging” for articles on depression, and I found out this one: Secret to a long life - get even more often The basic idea about the article is that if you repress your emotions, you won’t live a happy life. For example, you feel like shit but infront of your friends you put on a happy face and pretend everything is ok. Or if someone does a bad thing to you and you say it’s okay - but you feel like punching his face!

Anyway, I started to research a little bit more about this topic and found out interesting stuff. Here are a few examples of how we repress our emotions:

  • Ignoring our feelings
  • Pretending something hasn’t happened
  • Overeating
  • Eating foods loaded with sugar and fat
  • Excessive drinking of alcohol
  • Excessive use of recreational drugs
  • Using prescription drugs such as tranquilizers or Prozac
  • Exercising compulsively
  • Any type of compulsive behavior
  • Excessive sex with or without a partner
  • Always keeping busy so you can’t feel
  • Constant intellectualizing and analyzing
  • Excessive reading or TV
  • Working Excessively
  • Keeping conversations superficial
  • Burying angry emotions under the mask of peace and love

Let’s be honest here. I’m sure noone could say that he or she hasn’t experienced any of these points. It’s perfectly normal to have some of the symptoms. It’s bad when you do all of these things. And here are some symptoms of repressed emotions:

  • Fatigue
  • Depression without an apparent cause
  • Speaking of issues/interests rather than personal matters and feelings
  • Pretending something doesn’t matter when inside it does matter
  • Rarely talking about your feelings
  • Blowing up over minor incidents
  • Walking around with a knot in your stomach or tightness in your throat
  • Feeling your anger not at the time something happens but a few days later
  • In relationships, focusing discussions on children/ money rather than talking about yourselves
  • Difficulty talking about yourself
  • Troubled personal relationships with family, friends, acquaintances
  • A lack of ambition or motivation
  • Lethargic – who cares - attitude
  • Difficulty accepting yourself and others
  • Laughing on the outside while crying on the inside

Emotions repressed for the long-term can cause serious illness including cancer, arthritis, chronic fatigue, and many other major health problems.

So, here’s the tip of the iceberg. These point should give us a lot to talk about. I might talk about every of these point in the near future. More research on this field is definitely needed by my side and also I need to study them in practice with myself. Should be really helpful.