Should You Share Your Secret? The Psychological Impact of Keeping Things Hidden

May I share a secret with you? You might not want to answer “yes” the next time the question is posed to you. According to social psychologist Michael Slepian, PhD, an associate professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School. He specialises in the psychology of secrets. Being confided in has two sides The bad news is that we feel obligated to protect people’s secrets when they confide in us.

According to him, “The more people are consumed by that secret or feel compelled to conceal it on behalf of the confidant, the more burdensome it is.” Secrets are something that all people have. Though not all secrets are dark and sinister, almost everyone has something to conceal. However, psychological researchers hadn’t looked closely at the effects of harbouring secrets until lately.

Slepian began obliquely researching secrets. He was interested in the metaphor of being “weighed down” by a secret because he had been studying metaphor, which examines how individuals use language about bodily sensations to explain abstract concepts. He says, “I wondered if it reflected something deeper or if it was just a linguistic thing that people do.”

Read More: The Psychology Behind Keeping Secrets 

Keeping a secret may be draining. It’s awful. Slepian conducted a series of experiments with Nir Halevy, PhD, of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Adam Galinsky, PhD, of Columbia Business School. The participants were asked to recall either personal information they had not shared but would be open to discussing if it came up in conversation, or personal information they intended to keep private.

The researchers discovered that when people remembered their secrets, they felt more worn out and isolated. This was in contrast to when they remembered the knowledge that was kept secret. Additionally, there is proof that revealing the secret helps ease the burden. Slepian examined how sharing a secret could affect well-being with Edy Moulton-Tetlock, a management PhD candidate specialising in organisational behaviour.

Using Slepian’s list of 38 typical categories of secrets as a reference, they asked over 800 online users to describe their own secrets. The participants shared over 10,000 secrets, some of which they kept private (referred to as “total secrets”) and some of which they revealed (referred to as “confided secrets”). Because the participant received social support and because disclosing the secret appeared to reduce the amount of time the individual spent thinking about it, Slepian and Moulton-Tetlock discovered that confiding a secret predicted greater well-being.

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How Secrets Can Be Harmful?

With no chance to discuss the information with others, keeping a secret can have a negative psychological impact as well. It’s beneficial to discuss our issues with others who can offer advice on how to handle them. However, we feel ashamed and are reluctant to divulge information that has a strong immorality component, frequently for good reason.

Secrets that score highly on the other two criteria, however, are less likely to cause emotional distress. Unknown knowledge that scores highly on the connectivity dimension, for example, gives us comfort in knowing that we have important personal or social connections. Therefore, even if you are unable to share your thoughts about your secret sweetheart with others, thinking about this close relationship is undoubtedly uplifting.

Confidential information that scores highly on the insight component also inspires a sense of expertise. For instance, being trusted with confidential information at work gives you confidence. It assures you that you are a competent and reliable individual. This is a powerful realization. Naturally, a secret may simultaneously be high on two or even all three dimensions.

Both immorality and connectivity might be strong in the details of an affair. As a result, people who possess information may simultaneously experience the excitement of having a close relationship with another person and the shame of cheating on their spouse. Secrets are also connected to the human tendency to lie. Let’s look at a few reasons why we do so.

Why Do We Lie?

1. To save someone, some of us tell lies. For instance, if your best friend hides at your house while he is a criminal on the run. You pretend that he isn’t there when the police arrive.
2. When we don’t want to take responsibility for our acts, we lie. For instance, a spouse who lies about having an affair for clear reasons or a child who lies about damaging something precious to avoid punishment.
3. Some people tell lies to seem good or save face. For instance, a teacher may give a student a phoney grade to prevent the student from becoming disheartened or because they work in an environment where a student’s failure negatively affects them.
4. Many have a side boyfriend but conceal their relationship from their primary partner. This is a result of their lack of confidence that the primary boyfriend will accept the second boyfriend’s presence. These kinds of secrets wouldn’t be necessary if they were secure in their relationships and had discussed everything beforehand.
5. It’s possible that a corporation will not tell its employees about a new raise structure. A manager may remark that “if the employees hear that there is going to be a rise, they will complain when they don’t get one or when their rise is smaller than they thought it would be.” These supervisors don’t trust their staff with the truth.

Read More: Know the Secret of Improving Memory 

Conclusion

Our secrets can shape our identities, relationships, and how we interact with the outside world. Secrets and remorse might crush and suffocate us. Also, secrets can protect us by forcing us to enter a space where we must develop. We retain secrets out of fear, out of love, or just as a basic necessity to maintain control over our own stories. However, a secret is never truly isolated. Whether you like it or not, it always affects others around you.

According to psychology, it is exhausting to keep a secret for too long. Like a book opened on the same page, the mind continues returning to it and is unable to move on. This mental burden is not only emotional; it also has an impact on our stress levels, health, and capacity for wise decision-making. Some secrets set up walls where there used to be bridges, causing people to become further distant from one another.

Others provide relief and strengthen trust when shared with the appropriate person. But we do not need to reveal every secret. Some are unique to us, a subdued aspect of our identity. It involves determining which ones to release and which are worth carrying. Maybe it’s time to let go of the secret if it causes you pain, keeps you up at night, or makes you feel isolated.

Sometimes, we discover that disclosing the secret rather than keeping it to ourselves frees us. It could be in a diary post, a discussion, or even an anonymous letter. We are all secret keepers at heart. They give us our humanity. However, nature did not design humans to lift big objects by themselves.