Keeping other people’s and especially your own secrets has a negative impact on human health, becomes a cause of psychological discomfort. This is a scientific fact proven in a large-scale study.
For 10 years, Columbia University professor Michael Slepian has collected information from 50,000 volunteers who have kept their own and/or other people’s secrets for years without revealing them to anyone. All respondents had health problems, mostly of a psychological nature. The results of the scientist’s study were reported in the press service of Tufts University.
After carefully analyzing the data obtained, Michael Slepyan came to the conclusion that the keepers of secrets suffer from this moral burden not only emotionally, but also physically. They give up many pleasures in life, gradually losing interest in it, increasingly experiencing depressive feelings, becoming uncommunicative.
The professor explains this by the fact that most consider themselves decent people, but when a person goes beyond his own ideas about his own person, committing some unseemly act, he tries to hide it. And the more immoral the secret looks, the more suffering and shame it brings to its keeper.
People in such situations have an aggravated sense of guilt, which they try to drown out by some not always pleasant physical work, for example, to do a major cleaning or repair in an apartment. However, the secret continues to remain with the person, and “the cycle of self-punishment does not end” until you share your secret with someone.
Slepyan advises to be careful when choosing a “confessor”. He should be a person from whom you can expect sympathy and support. And if there is no such person nearby, and the kept secret does not pose much harm to others, then it is better to try to forget about him at all and start living from scratch.
