Leslie John

When you keep a secret, one of the tricky things is that

Your mind is very active.

Keeping a secret is not an inner activity.

It's not a neutral thing.

Yet we often think that that's a neutral thing, right?

We think that not sharing is neutral.

But in fact, it can be an incredibly active process.

So when you keep a secret, think about keeping a secret.

You have to constantly monitor, right?

When you're in a conversation where it could be relevant, you got to monitor your brain.

And then and that's stressful.

And so that like literally can increase your cortisol, your stress hormones.

It can affect you in this way.

And it also there have been lots of studies showing that when you are keeping a secret, you score lower on IQ tests because it literally preoccupies your brain.

It takes away brain space.

Yeah.

So one of the things, the principles that's really important in new relationships, new friendships, new acquaintanceships, new romances is mutual self-disclosure.

It's like a ping pong pattern of reciprocity where you say something, the other person reciprocates with something just as deep.

You don't start super deep.

You start maybe on a more shallow, but then you go back and forth, ping pong back and forth, and you get increasingly...