The Tug-of-War Behind What You Hold Back

You held it in again today.

Maybe it was frustration you swallowed in a meeting. Maybe grief you didn't want to explain to anyone. You felt it rise, you pressed it back down, and you carried on as if it had left no trace. Most of us do this many times a day. We tend to call it keeping it together.

For a long time the advice ran one direction. Holding feelings in is bad for you, so let them out. A new study out of NYU complicates that in a way worth sitting with. Researchers followed 483 first-year college students across a semester and tracked how they handled emotion. On average, more suppression lined up with more anxiety, more depression, and less satisfaction over time. That part matches what you might expect.

The harm, though, was not shared evenly. What mattered was how people felt about holding back. Students who sensed that staying quiet fit their own values in the moment carried far less cost. The ones who suffered were caught in something the researchers named an inner tug-of-war: wanting to speak, and feeling guilty for wanting to, at the same time.

A held-back feeling, on its own, is just restraint. The weight comes from the argument you have with yourself about whether you were allowed to feel it at all. One is a quiet choice. The other is a courtroom, and you are on trial for having a heart.

What this means for you

You can loosen the grip without forcing every feeling into the open. The next time something rises and you decide to hold it, try adding one honest sentence inside: this is mine to keep right now, and that is okay. Not shame. Not a verdict. A choice you are allowed to make. When holding back becomes a decision instead of a punishment, the same restraint stops costing you so much.

And when you do want to let something out, let that be a choice too. The point is not more expression or less. It is ending the war over whether your feeling had a right to exist in the first place.

Your feelings were not the problem. The trial was.

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What prompted this: New Research from Steinhardt Explores When Suppressing Emotions Impacts Mental Health, NYU Steinhardt