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When you’re sad, do you force yourself not to cry? When you’re hurt, do you minimize your pain? When you’re lonely, do you hide it behind a smile?

If the answer is 'yes,' you might be engaging in emotional suppression. You pretend that things are okay on the outside, even though you're in pain on the inside.

Many of us grew up learning to do this. Now, we habitually hide or suppress our difficult emotions, forcing ourselves to feel (or appear to feel) positive, optimistic and happy. It’s an attempt to regulate our emotions that ends up backfiring.

As the poet John O’Donohue wrote:

“No sooner have you expelled something that you cannot accept about yourself out the front door than it has made its way in the back door and is waiting for you again. It is a strange thing about consciousness that if you try deliberately to get rid of something or stop thinking about something, you only end up reinforcing it.”

Repressing our emotions can have a major, harmful effect on our physical and psychological health. For example, studieshave found that it negatively affects your immune system, increasing your risk of everything from the common cold to cancer.

If you're a suppressor, I want you to try being an expressor instead. Don't keep your feelings in; let them out. There are so many different science-backed ways to do that: talking to a trusted friend, creating something like a piece of art, speaking out loud to yourself, or writing in a journal. When the feelings stay within you, they so often get stuck and fester, and end up hurting you. But when your feelings come out, they can be witnessed, they can be understood, and they can then fade away.