Take a Load Off: How Secrets Can Physically Weigh You Down - New Paths to Purpose
Everyone has a few secrets to keep from the world. Most people live happily with hiding their distaste for a friend’s new haircut or for their spouse’s distant uncle, keeping their opinions to themselves for the sake of harmony and diplomacy. However, other secrets can be burdensome for people because they may feel estranged from others, or disingenuous, which may undermine their sense of meaning and purpose in life. Whether big or small, whether kept secret for a good reason or not, recent research suggests that the things people hide may literally weigh them down. In other words, secrets may cost people energy, not only the psychological energy it takes to hide things, but even physical, bodily stamina.
In their recent work, Michael Slepian from Tufts University and his collaborators investigate the fascinating hypothesis that keeping secrets may physical weigh people down. First, the researches asked participants to recall either a large and meaningful or small and trivial secret. In a next task, participants were instructed to look at a picture of a hill and to estimate how steep the hill appeared. It is commonly assumed that physical exhaustion leads to the perception of hills as steeper and distances as larger. In other words, the more tired and exhausted the body is, the more challenging each additional exercise seems. Importantly, the participants in the study by Slepian and colleagues were not physically exhausted, but merely thought about their secrets. However, thinking about more severe secrets led participants to estimate a hill as steeper, compared to thinking about minor secrets. This suggests that secrets can burden the body and the mind in a way that resembles physical exhaustion. In further studies, the authors found the same effect when asking people who were hiding their sexual orientation, or an infidelity. Thinking about their secrets led people to estimate distances as larger and physical tasks as more effortful. Finally, concealing a secret while being videotaped seemed to be so burdensome and exhausting to people that they were subsequently less likely to physically help an experimenter to move some heavy books.
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I believe in self-help groups, getting rid of secrets is called “dropping the rock.”