We’re all hiding 9 secrets and they’re eating us up inside

The average person hides nine kinds of secrets, from lying to hidden romantic desires. This can be a big burden because secrets have a habit of flashing into their minds unprompted. Confessing them can sometimes bring relief, but some secrets are too sensitive to share. As a result, researchers are investigating psychological strategies to cope with them.

“You can think about the secret when you shower, when you wash the dishes, or when you go to work,” she says Val Bianchi at the University of Melbourne in Australia. “Having these thoughts in your mind when you absolutely want them to is often uncomfortable and people seem to get stuck in vicious cycles of spontaneously thinking about their secrets as they go about their lives and feeling worse about them.”

Bianchi has spent years researching the psychological toll of keeping a secret and ways to alleviate it, with her latest research funded by Australia’s National Intelligence Service. Intelligence agents must keep highly sensitive secrets to protect national security, so they need strategies to shoulder that responsibility, he says.

“That’s why so many people are fascinated by CIA agents – how do they keep these big secrets and leave them behind when they have to go back to normal life?” he says Lisa Williams at the University of New South Wales in Australia, who was not part of the study.

To better understand how secrets affect people’s well-being, Bianchi and her colleagues recruited 240 people online and asked them to fill out a survey about their secrets. Participants indicated whether they had any secrets from 38 categories, including lying, cheating on a partner, stealing, addiction or self-harm.

On average, respondents had nine types of secrets, most commonly about lying (78 percent of participants) and feeling unhappy about a personal physical aspect (71 percent). Other common secrets were about finances (70 percent), romantic desires (63 percent) and sexual behavior (57 percent).

Next, participants were asked to identify their most important secret and fill out a daily diary for two weeks about how they felt. They usually reported their most important secret as negative, and when they thought about it, their thoughts wandered to worries or concerns they had about the secret.

Bianchi’s previous research found that important secrets tend to enter people’s minds about once every 2 hours. They often appear in the mind “when you’re doing something that doesn’t require all of your attention or all of your cognitive capacity, because your mind has space to go into the mystery and think about it,” he says.

The reason we evolved to keep secrets is probably because, while burdensome to the individual, they can promote group cohesion. Withholding information can protect us and others from harm, embarrassment, or loss of social status. “For example, if you find out that a colleague is being investigated at work, you may choose to keep quiet about it rather than slander others to protect their reputation within the organization,” says Bianchi.

In some circumstances, admitting a secret can provide some relief, Bianchi says. In particular, telling them to people who are not directly affected by their content and who are empathetic, such as confessors or therapists, can help ease their burden, he says.

On the other hand, some secrets cannot be shared with anyone else, including top secret information held by intelligence officers. In these cases, it can be helpful for the secret keeper to talk to someone about how the secret makes them feel without revealing its true content, Bianchi says. Alternatively, psychological techniques such as distraction can help, he says. The team now plans to explore these strategies.

According to Williams, established emotion regulation techniques can also be beneficial. “If you can’t let go of the secret because it’s part of your job or for other reasons, then you need to do something about the negative emotions you feel about it,” he says. “We know that it’s generally not a good idea to try to ignore or suppress negative emotions, so we could use tools to think about the secret a little differently and try to reframe it in a positive way. Maybe instead of seeing it as burdensome or worrisome, you can try to think about the positive aspects of it, like the importance or value of holding it.”

Another option for people who don’t work in intelligence might be to write privately about secrets and how they feel, she says James Pennebaker at the University of Texas at Austin, who has previously shown that journaling emotions is often therapeutic. “My research started by noticing that people who had experienced any kind of major shock were much more likely to have health problems if they didn’t talk about the events than if they did,” he says.

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