Bottling up feelings: What to do
Bottling up feelings can be helpful in some instances for a while, but bottling up your feelings all the time and never letting them out is not always helpful. It doesn't help you improve your life.
In some situations, it can be helpful to suppress your emotions—or rather, to temper your reaction to them. During a performance review, for example, it’s better to remain calm.
Some people do so by bottling up their emotions, while others do so precisely by controlling their emotions and responding consciously.
When you bottle up your feelings, you try to suppress all outward signs of your emotion, such as a facial expression or tension in your body[1]. You try, as it were, to keep a poker face.
If you bottle up your emotions for a short time and come back to them later (in short order), there is not much to worry about. But if bottling up your emotions for an extended period of time is something you do, it can have all sorts of negative consequences.
Bottling up feelings depends on who you are with and in what kind of situations. For example, if you are with people, you are more likely to bottle up your feelings than if you are alone.
The worse or more distant your social relationship with someone is, the more you bottle up your feelings. You are more likely to show your feelings to your intimate partner than to that colleague from work.
Feelings are also often bottled up to avoid conflict. However, this does not solve the problem, which means you may still end up in a conflict later on[2].
Consequences of pent-up feelings
To begin with, suppressing feelings actually leads to worse emotions than, for example, interpreting those feelings in a different way. This is also known as reframing.
In addition, it negatively affects how you function in relationships and reduces your overall well-being[3].
If you bottle up your feelings at work, it’s not good for your work relationships or how much you enjoy your job, and it can even increase your likelihood of quitting [4]. However, this might not be necessary at all if you do express your feelings.
Are you experiencing symptoms of depression? With mild symptoms, bottling up your emotions might still help you feel a little better temporarily, but with moderate to severe depression, bottling up your feelings no longer makes a difference in how you feel. So it won’t help you overcome your depression[5].
Bottling up feelings in social situations
As mentioned, it may seem that bottling up feelings during conversations is a good strategy for getting through a conversation. Especially if this is a business conversation, but unfortunately this is not the case.
In fact, bottling up feelings during social situations makes conversations more difficult. This is because when you bottle up your feelings, you create a kind of mask. Your face will not have the expressions that match your emotion. While your nonverbal communication is important for people to understand you well.
In addition, bottling up your feelings during social interactions also increases your stress levels. The negative consequences affect both you and the person you’re talking to[6]. Not helpful at all!
Bottling up feelings and your memory
Bottling up your feelings also affects your memory. Research shows that reframing your feelings reduces emotions (both positive and negative) and that reframing can change what you say and how you express yourself, but it does not affect memory.
Are you actually bottling up your feelings? Then you reduce how you express yourself, but it does not reduce the emotion. Unfortunately, it does reduce your memory[7]! Not at all useful during an evaluation interview, or any other important conversation, because you might forget important feedback that could be useful to improve your performance.
Bottling up fears and feelings
A correlation has also been found between people with panic disorder and bottling up their feelings. People with panic disorder are more likely to do this than those who do not suffer from it. They did this particularly with feelings of anger, fear, and unhappiness. At the same time, people with panic disorder find it difficult to name their emotions and are more aware of their feelings[8].
Expressing your feelings
So one way to deal with feelings is to reframe feelings, but sometimes you just have feelings that you need or want to express to other people.
So how do you start there?
In any case, it is helpful to know why it is important to express your emotions, or show them in your expressions. In any case, it is a way to inform your environment about how you feel, so that it can be taken into account. Or so that your environment can draw conclusions from it.
For example, if you’ve done something you ’re ashamed of and you express this, the listener will understand that you want to handle things differently in the future, so that you can act in a more socially acceptable way. In fact, expressing shame is often positive, especially if you’ve done something that was out of line.
Expressing your emotions can also give the other person information about what you need. For example, if your work makes you unhappy, but you bottle this up, colleagues or supervisors won't know you need help. Whereas if you do express your emotions, you may get your help and, as a result, your work can become much more enjoyable[9].
Acknowledging your emotions
To be able to express your emotions, it’s first important to acknowledge that you have them. You can start by naming your emotions in your mind and determining what purpose they serve. After all, an emotion often tries to help you move forward; even if the emotion is negative, there’s often a positive intention behind it.
For example, do you get a bad emotion from your work? If so, that can motivate you to do something about it. To take action to make your work more enjoyable. If that doesn't work out then, you can always go find a new job. What do you have to lose if you don't like your job anyway? Then by expressing your emotion, things can actually only get better.
Mindfulness for recognition
Mindfulness can help you be more aware of your emotions. For example, you can set off your phone's alarm several times a day and then take a moment to do a mindfulness exercise. You can take a moment to check what thoughts you are having, what emotions you are feeling and how your body is feeling.
This can already make you much more aware of your feelings and can make it easier for you to be more aware of your emotions and what to do with them in other situations as well.
Keep a journal
If you’re in a situation where you can’t always express your emotions, keeping a journal can still be a good way to at least write them down. That way, you don’t bottle up your emotions for days on end, but can give them a place to go. In this case, on paper. This gives you more clarity about your emotions, making it easier for you to revisit them later with people who might be able to help you process them (such as at work or in your relationship).
Use connective communication
There is a formula you can use when you find that you want to express emotions, but then someone else actually needs to do something to improve the situation. Namely, you then name the following:
- The Situation
- The feelings you get from the situation
- What you would like how it should be
- What you need from others.
For example:
"I notice that you are again not on time with the delivery of certain products. This frustrates me tremendously, because I need that to do my job properly. From now on, can you indicate earlier if you are late in delivering the products, or start earlier which will allow you to be on time?"
In this way, you can often resolve conflicts more easily and have your emotions not bottled up, but named.
Finding the cause of your emotions
Do you find that you have emotions that don’t seem to fit the situation at all? Or for which there doesn’t seem to be a simple solution? Then you might also want to examine the beliefs that are causing those emotions. Your ideas about how the world works and how you’re supposed to function within it determine much of your thoughts, emotions, and behavior.
For example, with hypnotherapy or knowledge of hypnosis, you can go back to the first moment when you had an emotion. Then you can do something with that moment to repair the limiting belief to a helping belief.
You'll find that you then suffer less from negative emotions, or find it easier to express your emotions, because after applying that technique, you know it's okay to express your emotions.
Would you like to learn more about hypnosis and how you can use it to help yourself or others manage their emotions? Then join us for the free online masterclass.
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