Secrets hurt your overall health
Holding onto a secret is hard work. It requires constant effort and deceit. Whether it’s an affair, a crime, or something sensitive entrusted to you by another person, carrying a secret on your shoulders is undoubtedly an emotional strain.
For the first time, researchers have looked at how secret-keeping impacts your overall health, and the results aren’t good.
Published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the recent study found that the average person keeps 13 significant secrets, and it’s typical for five of those to never be disclosed to anybody else.
A secret, for the purpose of this study, was defined as something people commonly keep from others about themselves or their past, including infidelity, sexual orientation, theft, poor professional performance, drug taking, and undergoing an abortion procedure. The most common secret for people to keep is having sexual thoughts about somebody who isn’t their partner, followed by actually having sexual relations with that person.
It wasn’t the secret-keeping itself that proved to impinge on people’s health, but rather, thinking about those secrets. On an index of 0-100 covering all aspects of overall health and wellbeing, those who pondered their secrets less than once a week had a health index of 66/100, while those whose secrets plagued them everyday only reached 49/100.
Researchers have discovered that thinking about your secrets – which often concern unresolved issues – can encourage chronic surges of stress hormones such as cortisol, which lead to everything from stomach/bowel problems and high blood pressure to a weak immune system, memory loss, problems sleeping and the disruption of one’s metabolism. Spiking cortisol levels can also be linked to osteoporosis and loss of collagen in the skin, which causes wrinkles.
Dr Gopal Chopra, a neurosurgeon and academic at Duke University in the US, has studied secret-keeping intensively. ‘‘To manage a mismatch between reality and the world around you requires the additional use of the prefrontal cortex and amygdala,’’ Chopra says. ‘‘When your brain is working at cross-purposes, the conflict creates stress.’’
Secret-keeping also affects your ability to undertake other tasks in life, according to research by Columbia University’s Dr Michael Slepian. In one of his studies, people who had concealed a romantic affair from their partner found everyday tasks (like carrying the shopping) more of a burden. In another study of gay participants, Slepian found those who were in the closet were less productive with an everyday task than those who didn’t keep their sexuality a secret.
These kinds of studies are small in scale but prove useful in understanding how burdensome keeping secrets can be. Importantly, perception of how big the secret is to you plays a big part: in another of Slepian’s studies, he asked questions such as ‘‘How much do you think about your secret?’’ and ‘‘How much does it bother you?’’, then participants were shown a picture of a hill – and asked to judge the slant of it. Unsurprisingly, those who were more consumed by their secrets thought that hill to be steeper.
This doesn’t just apply to secrets you keep about yourself, but secrets you keep for others, too. So, given that an estimated 95 per cent of people are keeping secrets of some kind, how do you decide what to do with yours?
There is naturally the option of telling your loved ones your secrets, but in doing this you should consider the possibility of doing them harm (like when you’re ‘‘clearing your conscience’’ about an affair) and how sensitively this can be approached.
Given the confidential nature of therapy, a counsellor or therapist may be the best person for you to confide in. Offloading things you’ve kept to yourself for years will have no other ramifications in your real life – your secrets are safe with them, as it were. They may also be able to help you deal with any shame or other negative thoughts you have about yourself because of those secrets.
Failing that, take to pen and paper. Writing your secrets down over several days (then throwing them away) has been shown to reduce stress hormone levels and blood pressure.
Lee Suckling has a masters degree specialising in personal health reporting. Do you have a health topic you’d like Lee to investigate? Send an email to life.style@fairfaxmedia.co.nz with Dear Lee in the subject line.