Gemma Spake

And then they measured their cortisol levels.

The cortisol levels of these individuals didn't jump that significantly when they read the paper.

But when they then exposed them to a personal stressor afterwards, that is when the people who had been exposed to the negative news story, that's when their stress response was revealed to be much, much larger compared to those who read the neutral stories.

Essentially, the story may not have stressed them out, but it definitely lowered their ability to deal with their daily lives.

And we know the more stressed you are, the less connected you are with your emotions.

The very environment we are in right now, you and me, like the chaos that we are enduring as a society, that does impact your personal ability to feel sad, to feel happy, to feel anything at all, because your cognitive resources are already taken up with so much other stuff happening around you.

When it comes to emotional suppression, though, because that's really what we're talking about, there's actually two levels going on, right?

This level we've just been talking about is often very unconscious, like the nervous system jumps in, shuts everything down, like goes to town, just leveling down our emotions, making us numb.

The second level, though, is when we actually employ very often specific deliberate coping mechanisms to shut down our emotions for us.

The first level, like no emotions are getting through at all.

The second level, emotions are getting through, but then we're fielding these emotions using these certain methods or coping mechanisms.

So we've talked about the first kind, but what are these underlying methods that we use in the second level of emotional suppression?

You definitely are probably familiar with a lot of these.

And I think the biggest one that I think of for a lot of smart 20-somethings, like what we find ourselves doing is over-intellectualizing.

If you are a smart person, you are so used to being able to outthink or outsmart any problem in your life that you apply the same behavior to your feelings.

intellectualizing, this is essentially we are trying to reason our way through what we're feeling in order to make those emotions more manageable.

And I read this wonderful Psychology Today article that basically said, by channeling our emotions towards logic and reason and assessment, we make what is deeply personal a lot more abstract and

Like we kind of get to remain at arm's length from it without actually feeling the hard parts of it because it's something that we understand theoretically and therefore we don't have to understand emotionally.

You know, if you're deeply hurt by a relationship breakdown, if you're really terrified of being single, if you're struggling with heartbreak,

Instead of letting yourself be sad, if you like throw yourself into analyzing emotional attachment styles and reading self-help books and like microanalyzing every single thing, like in a very systematic way, that means you don't actually have to feel how sad you are.