How To Stop Suppressing Emotions
Emotions tend to get a bad rap in our society, especially when they are expressed in ineffective or unpleasant ways. Sadness that turns into complete overwhelm, anger that turns into shouting, or guilt that turns into constant people pleasing. Importantly, emotions are distinct from their common behaviors, and they are a vital part of our existence and survival as humans.
Emotions are information signals that originate in the limbic part of your brain. They are part of a highly advanced communication system that involve your body communicating to yourself and you communicating with others.
Here’s a quick, classic example. Let’s say you are taking hike, walking along, breathing fresh air, and enjoying the sights and sounds of nature. Suddenly, you notice a long, slender creature slithering in the path beneath your feet. Instinctively, your body responds: your heart races, your muscles tense, you jump back, freeze up, or run away.
In this scenario, the emotion is fear. The fear cues you into the threat by sending the physiological responses through your body which lead you to seek protection. This is your brain and nervous system’s way of protecting you from danger. There is nothing illogical or sensitive about experiencing emotion. It’s simply part of the survival mechanism of human beings.
As we grow older, many of us learn to suppress emotions, especially the ones that make us feel vulnerable. Typically, we do so because we have not had success as we express our emotions and seek to get our needs met. We learn to start suppression emotions in order to protect ourselves.
How To Stop Suppressing Emotions
Over time, this short-term protection has long-term costs. For example, emotional suppression can require increased energy, taking a toll on physical and mental health. It can lead to stress, burnout, and disconnection from self and others.
Below is a practical guide for how to stop suppressing emotions. Grounded with these skills, you can embrace them as the valuable communication system they truly are, use them to your advantage, and experience more harmony.
We’re going to discuss the pros and cons of suppressing emotions as a coping skill and how to stop suppressing emotions. This framework can help you decide the best way to manage your own internal experience.
What Does Suppressing Emotions Mean?
Suppression of emotions is when we actively push or unconsciously avoid uncomfortable thoughts or negative emotions away from our present moment experience.
This can include shutting down, numbing withdrawing, or avoiding emotions through other activities are means. Suppression could look like:
- Numbing through scrolling on your phone, sex, food, alcohol, or substances
- Avoiding emotions by over-focusing on thoughts, logic, or explanations
- Distraction from difficult experiences through television, focus on work, etc.
Whenever we avoid our feelings, in one way or another, we are actively suppressing them.
Anxiety And Emotional Suppression
Emotional suppression can also be understood as an avoidance strategy that leads to additional anxiety. Interestingly, anxiety is often not just about fear itself. It can be a sign that we are working hard to avoid or suppress fear. In many cases, anxiety becomes a fear of fear.
Rather than fully experiencing emotions like fear, hurt, sadness, or vulnerability, we stay stuck anticipating them, analyzing them, or trying to prevent them. This can create a cycle of overthinking, worry, and nervous system activation that never fully resolves because the underlying emotion remains unprocessed.
Anxiety therapy can help untangle what is truly happening beneath the anxiety and work through the emotions that may be driving it in the first place.
Is It Healthy to Suppress Emotions?
At times, suppressing particular parts of your emotional experience is adaptive and healthy. Expressing every emotion as soon as we have them can cause problems, especially in social functioning.
If your best friend shares with you that their father was just diagnosed with cancer, it would make sense for you to temporarily suppress feelings of disappointment after a bad date. It does not mean that your emotions are not important. Just that it would be a bad time to express them. So you contain your own experience to make room for theirs.
However, if we over-use suppression strategies, we end up ignoring our own emotions and experience over time. This can have negative effects on physical and mental wellbeing.
Since emotions are informational signals that cue you into things like values, boundaries, needs, and emotional safety, making sure that we know how to access our emotions when we need to is crucial.
Plus, suppressed emotions eventually create internal dysfunction and health problems. Inevitably, we more spend time thinking about emotions that we try to avoid. There is also interesting research that connects suppression of emotions leads to physical health concerns. Like increased stress and cardiac risk, hypertension, and even earlier death.
What Happens When You Suppress Your Emotions For Too Long?
While emotional suppression may provide short-term relief, it often creates long-term challenges. Emotions do not simply disappear when ignored. Instead, they tend to show up in other ways.
Over time, suppressing emotions can increase stress in the body and nervous system. When your body stays on high alert for extended periods, it can contribute to fatigue, burnout, headaches, digestive issues, sleep difficulties, and even impact the immune system. Your body was designed to process emotional experiences, not carry them indefinitely.
You may also notice feeling disconnected from yourself. Many people who suppress difficult emotions eventually struggle to identify what they want, need, or value. Since emotions provide important information about boundaries, relationships, safety, and personal needs, ignoring them can make decision-making more difficult.
In relationships, emotional suppression often creates distance. When you hide hurt, fear, disappointment, or loneliness, your loved ones lose access to what is happening inside of you. As a result, misunderstandings increase and emotional connection becomes harder to maintain.
Eventually, suppressed emotions often emerge in indirect ways. For example, sadness may show up as numbness. Fear may appear as overthinking. Hurt may come out as irritability or criticism. The emotions remain present even when they are hidden beneath protective behaviors.
The good news is that emotional suppression is not permanent. Once you learn how to safely reconnect with your emotional experience, your body and mind can begin to process what has been waiting for your attention.
How To Not Suppress Emotions
Let’s talk about how to stop suppressing emotions before covering how to release emotions we’ve been suppressing.
Again, suppressing emotions temporarily every once in a while can be appropriate in certain circumstances. Yet, to care for our mental and physical well being, we want to make sure that we’ve got solid skills to prevent suppression of emotions over time.
Plus, we cannot selectively choose our suppressed or repressed emotions. If we want to experience positive emotions, we have to tolerate the negative emotions too.
Build Awareness
Many of us never received clear, detailed emotional education. Feeling emotions can be confusing, overwhelming, and uncomfortable. Expressing your feelings is a skill that needs to be learned.
Becoming education and aware on what emotions really are and how to feel emotions can help you in regulating your emotions.
Knowing that your emotions are valid, make sense, and have universal components we all can relate to is the first step in deciding you do not have to push them away.
Label Emotions
When you notice that you are comfortable, learn how to name feelings. Stating the emotion you are experiencing out loud, even if only to yourself, reduces the intensity of them.
Remember, emotions are signals. When the limbic part of your brain gets the sense that the prefrontal cortex part of your brain got the message, it can stop continuing to send it. Stating the emotion out loud is an effective, simple practice to become integrated.
Learn Your Triggers
Whenever you experience a difficult or distressing emotion, see if you can identify the trigger of the emotion. The trigger is the event or indicator that lead to the experience you are feeling.
Depending on the emotion, the trigger may not be so clear. If you notice a pit in your stomach of anxiety but are not sure what you are anxious about, take a moment to slow down and breathe into that pit to see whether you can make sense of the feeling.
Other times, the trigger may seem obvious. For instance, if your boyfriend breaks up with you, you might feel sad, alone and fearful. The external trigger in this case is the breakup.
Yet, there may be internal triggers as well. If your boyfriend breaks up with you, you might take in a message of rejection or be reminded of other times you were abandoned. The meaning you make of an external situation can also result in an internal emotional response.
Connect To Your Body
Emotions are energy and they are expressed through the body. When you become uncomfortable, it’s important to start to identify where the emotions are triggered and stored in the body so that you can pay close attention to these places.
Here are some examples of where my clients have experienced feeling emotions in the body. Remember, your own experience may be different and is unique to you.
- Anger through heat across the body or tension in the face or chest
- Sadness as a heaviness in the chest or back of the throat
- Fear as a knot in the stomach
- Joy as a lightness in the chest heart
Sit With Emotions
This might be the hardest step of them all. To learn how to stop suppressing emotions, we have to experience them fully.
Once you have done work of slowing down, labeling your emotion, and marking your triggers and body responses, it’s time to sit with your emotions.
This is the part that can be uncomfortable. We literally have to feel and experience the discomfort of the emotions in order for them to release and go away.
Breathing is a useful tool in this step. You may notice that as you pay attention to an experience of anxiety and simply breathe into the pit in your stomach, it will slowly begin to soften.
But I have good news for you! Research shows that when we stop running away from our emotions, they typically only manifest as physiological symptoms for about 90 seconds, with the chemicals leaving your body after that.
Identify Your Need
The entire point of the emotional system is to connect us to a need. If you feel fear, your body is looking for soothing or safety. If you feel anxiety, your body may be looking for reassurance or comfort. And if you feel anger, you may need justice.
As you sit with uncomfortable emotions, check in with yourself and see if you can access the need that lies just on the other side of your experience.
Act With Intention
If your need makes sense or is reasonable, see if you can go about getting the need met! Maybe you need to ask your partner for reassurance if you are feeling insecure.
Other times, our body sends us danger cues and thinks we are unsafe when we are actually not, based on intergenerational trauma or past traumatic experiences.
For instance, because evolutionarily being in the “out-group” could lead to isolation and lack of resources, our bodies may send intense fear signals if someone does not like us. In these cases, it is worth acknowledging the usefulness of the fear while reassuring yourself that you are safe in the present moment.
Attend Therapy
The journey of emotional expression can be long and difficult, especially if you have been successful in suppressing emotions in the past. You may even wonder what is the point of expressing emotions if you’ve never had success or healthy dynamics in doing so.
Therapy for individuals can be a safe, supportive place to get in touch with emotions, learn to build tolerance for discomfort, and practice skills to communicate and get your needs met. You’ll learn how to stop suppressing emotions. Working with a professional can create the safety and structure to a process that could easily become overwhelming full of strong emotions on your own.
How To Release Suppressed Emotions
Learning how to release suppressed emotions is not about expressing every feeling immediately or acting on every impulse. Instead, it involves creating enough safety to become curious about your internal experience.
Many people learned to suppress emotions because showing vulnerability felt unsafe, overwhelming, or ineffective at some point in their lives. Therefore, releasing emotions often requires patience and self-compassion.
As you practice noticing and responding to emotions differently, you build trust with yourself. Over time, emotions become less frightening and more useful. Rather than viewing feelings as problems to solve, you can begin to see them as messengers carrying important information.
The following strategies can help you reconnect with and release emotions in a healthy way.
Notice Avoidance
Pay attention to the moments when you automatically reach for distractions. For example, you might find yourself scrolling social media, overworking, overanalyzing, binge-watching television, or staying constantly busy.
Rather than judging yourself, simply notice the pattern. Ask yourself, “What feeling might I be trying not to experience right now?” Often, awareness is the first step toward change.
Approach With Curiosity
Many protective reactions develop to help us avoid emotional pain. If you notice yourself becoming defensive, shutting down, or staying stuck in logic, gently explore what might exist underneath those responses.
Often, beneath frustration is hurt. Under anger is fear. Beneath numbness is sadness. Slowing down enough to discover what is underneath can help emotions move instead of remaining stuck.
Name Your Feelings
Research consistently shows that labeling emotions can help regulate the nervous system.
Instead of saying, “I’m fine,” try identifying a more specific emotional experience. You might notice disappointment, loneliness, anxiety, grief, embarrassment, or overwhelm.
The more precisely you can name your emotions, the easier it becomes to understand what they are communicating.
Observe Your Body
Emotions are physical experiences, not just mental ones.
When an emotion arises, notice where it lives in your body. You may feel tightness in your chest, heaviness in your stomach, pressure in your throat, or tension in your shoulders.
Rather than trying to make the sensation disappear, see if you can stay present with it for a few moments by focusing on that area of your body. Breathe slowly and allow yourself to observe the experience without immediately changing it. Often, emotions begin to soften when they are acknowledged.
Share With Someone You Trust
Emotions often heal through connection.
Consider sharing your experience with a trusted friend, partner, family member, or therapist. When another person responds with understanding and care, you have a positive, healing experience in emotions, which trains your nervous system that it’s safe to feel them.
Identify The Deeper Need
Every emotion points toward something important.
When you identify the need beneath the emotion, you can respond intentionally rather than simply reacting to discomfort.
Therapy For Emotional Suppression
If you have spent years suppressing emotions, reconnecting with them can feel overwhelming. You may not know where to start. You may even worry that once you open the door to difficult feelings, they will become unmanageable.
Therapy provides a safe environment to explore emotions gradually and at a pace that feels manageable. Rather than forcing emotional expression, therapy helps you understand why suppression developed in the first place and how those protective patterns may have helped you survive difficult experiences. In other words, therapy can help identify the root cause, or where your nervous system learned it had to suppress to keep you safe, and create new experiences of safety.
If emotional suppression is affecting your relationships, self-esteem, anxiety, or overall wellbeing, working with a therapist can help you reconnect with yourself in a healthier way.
Learning how to stop suppressing emotions is not about becoming more emotional. It is about becoming unstuck by letting emotions move through you rather than stuck in cycles of suppression and flooding. When you can recognize, understand, and respond to your emotions, they become valuable guides instead of experiences you need to avoid.
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