Just last weekend I watched one of my best friends win the fencing national championships. For the last six years of my life, I have been a fencer. Fencing is a rather individual sport; winning lies solely on your shoulders at times but relying on your friends in the sport is essential to success. As I made quite a few friends in the fencing community, I was afforded the unique privilege of watching and supporting my friends through success, but also witnessing their demise.
When referencing how to deal with emotions, out of sight and out of mind is a tale many individuals have been taught. Emotional suppression is simply when we push our more uncomfortable emotions out of our minds. In thought, this sounds like a viable strategy. The emotions we are uncomfortable with or do not want to feel we should just push away. However, research has shown that avoiding our more uncomfortable emotions only amplifies them and can even have detrimental physical effects.
Something as extreme as a traumatic event or something less significant like losing a fencing tournament can create the space to not embrace the emotions you feel. In a study done with individuals with anxiety, there was a group of individuals that were being educated to embrace their emotions and accept them; the other group was being primed to reject their emotions as they came up. Both groups were then shown an explicitly provocative video and the group primed to reject their emotions, showed significantly higher signs of distress after the film: their heart rates were faster, their pace of breath increased, and they saw skin conductance which includes sweaty palms, and goosebumps. Their accepting counterparts showed significantly faster return from distress after watching.
These additional feelings that were felt by the rejectors are called psychological amplification. This is a process that makes us feel our physical signs of distress with the less favorable emotions like anxiety and sadness more strongly. There is a reason the rejectors had greater feelings of anxiety and demonstrated more physical stress. When we do not accept our emotions, the suppression leads us to feel them more strongly. Research replicating this has long led to the same outcome.
The reason and greater danger of this is due to our restricted emotional capacity. The human brain is limited in every way possible. We have limited memory, a limited cognitive capacity, emotional capacity, and more. These limitations seem to make us inferior however, they are a great benefit. One of the benefits is we forget our bad days faster than our good ones. Even though in the moment those bad days and those tough losses feel more powerful, long term we are more likely to remember our greatest wins and our good days.
The Nobel Prize winning theory of bounded rationality told us that our brain can only process a certain number of stimuli at one moment to make a decision. Emotional capacity operates no differently, we can only feel so many emotions at once. Any behaviors or habits of suppressing will amplify and prolong those despairing feelings.
How can we help? Brant Burleson who served a 30-year tenure at Purdue University as a researcher and professor studied how we can best provide emotional support. His research found that the best method is called highly-person centered messages. This includes, “Explicitly recognize and legitimize the other’s feelings, help the other to articulate those feelings, elaborate reasons why those feelings might be felt, and assist the other to see how those feelings fit in a broader context.”
Burleson’s research is significant because it provides us with a framework regarding how to provide effective emotional support to help our friends feel their more challenging emotions. This is also proven effective in clinical trials with patients. Referencing research published in the National Library of Medicine, social emotional support has been shown to affect mortality from diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, arthritis, and emphysema, while social support consistently led to better outcomes for patients in an elderly population.
It is important to note that this practice of providing highly person-centered support is a practice that is inclusive of all people and no situation renders them less useful. As we know men and women, and a variety of different races, religions, and cultures experience emotions differently and process them very uniquely. It’s important to note though that various studies of these additional factors had no implications on these behaviors’ efficacy.
Now, this may sound rather intuitive: feel your hard emotions, don’t shove them in a hole. But there is greater meaning behind embracing those more difficult feelings. When we do not feel the negative emotions like resentment, remorse, or anxiety, we inhibit our ability to feel good emotions. The more negative ones will be amplified and because of our limited cognitive and emotional capacity, we won’t experience joy, gratitude, and happiness. We live to experience those great feelings, do not fall into the trap of avoiding the bad because you will never be able to feel the greatest feelings of life.
