Shankar Vedantam

They were titled Keeping Secrets and Coming Clean.

Today, Leslie returns to the show to respond to listener comments and stories about the costs of keeping secrets.

Leslie John, welcome back to Hidden Brain.

Leslie, in our interactions with other people, we spend a lot of time weighing how much of ourselves to share with them.

Why is it that so many of us avoid revealing ourselves to others?

In your research, Leslie, you found that keeping a secret can negatively impact our physical and mental health.

Describe for me very briefly some of these costs.

Many secrets that we keep often center on regrets that we have, maybe a time that we lied or stole or cheated someone.

Here's a message we received from a listener named Claire.

So Leslie, clearly this secret was a much bigger deal for Claire than it was for her parents and her friend.

What's interesting is that the story echoed what we've heard from several other listeners.

The distress that we feel about our secrets is often wildly disproportionate to the reactions of others, including, you know, our quote-unquote victims.

Why is it that our secrets have this outsized impact on us?

I'm wondering if the fact that Claire kept her secret for so long in some ways amplified it in her mind.

In other words, the longer she kept it, the more she is thinking about it, the more she's ruminating about it, and the bigger it gets in her mind.

But of course, it's not getting bigger in anyone else's mind.

Right, right.

So there are secrets that have to do with what we've done, but there are also secrets that get at who we are.

Here is listener Emma.

So one thing that strikes me about Emma's story, Leslie, is that this is not about something that she did, but about who she is.