HER: “Are you upset with me?”
ME: “No, I’m just in a bad mood.”
HER: “What’s wrong?”
ME: “I really don’t want to talk about it.”
HER: “Ok… but is it something I did?”
ME: “No, but I really don’t want to discuss it.”
HER: “I see… but maybe I can help? If you would just tell me what’s wrong…”
This is the kind of conversation I’ve had a thousand and one times with various girlfriends.
Whenever I’m feeling upset, bad, uncertain, miserable, the last thing I want to do is discuss it.
In my experience, bad moods tend to pass — sleep fixes almost anything.
But when I try to give a form to my bad moods, when I crystalize the dark clouds in my head into little droplets called words, then somehow all that negativity becomes real and permanent. And if I go one step beyond, and share those words with somebody else, it becomes doubly real and permanent.
HER: “Are you still feeling bad about X?”
ME: No. [thinking to myself, no, I wasn’t, until now.]
This is not to put the blame on any of my ex gfs. I know they were just trying to help. I also know I’m the odd one out, and that most people actually feel better when they discuss what’s bothering them.
BUT!
I was still pleased to come across a study a while back, published in the prestigious journal Science, that pretty much backed me up.
Two cognitive scientists at Cambridge had a hypothesis that suppressing negative thoughts not only would not harm mental health… but would actually improve it.
They set up an experiment where they trained some 120 people, across 6 countries, in the techniques of sucking it up. The result was just as they predicted:
– no paradoxical increase in negative thoughts
– less frequent, less vivid, and less anxiety-producing negative thoughts
So there you go — just suck it up.
Or don’t.
It’s likely that this Cambridge study is just a swing of the pendulum. We’ve been told for so long that it’s important to express what you feel, it was inevitable somebody somewhere would try to say otherwise.
And I’m sure that if you like to talk things out when you feel bad, there are plenty of studies to back you up also.
Maybe it’s just like Walker Percy said, that modern science cannot say anything about you specifically as an individual.
That’s my bit of inspiration for you for this Sunday.
If you want some more, you can find it in my 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.
Most of those commandments have to do with copywriting and marketing. But a few have to do with thinking and living. As you can imagine, those are the most valuable ones. If you’re interested: