Psst! Can you keep a secret?
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The average person keeps nine types of secrets, ranging from having told a lie to hidden romantic desires. This can be a great burden, because secrets have a disturbing habit of flashing into the mind unbidden. Confessing them can sometimes bring relief, but some secrets are too sensitive to share. As a result, researchers are investigating psychological strategies to cope with them.
“You might think about secrets when you shower, when you do the dishes or when you go to work,” says Val Bianchi of the University of Melbourne in Australia. “Having these thoughts pop into your head when you don’t necessarily want them to be is often uncomfortable, and people seem to get caught in vicious cycles of spontaneously thinking about their secrets as they go through life, and feeling worse about them.”
Bianchi has spent years researching the psychological burden of secrecy and ways to ease it, and her latest research is funded by the Australian Office of National Intelligence. Intelligence operators must keep highly sensitive secrets to protect national security, so they need strategies to carry this responsibility, she says.
“This is why so many people are fascinated by CIA agents – how do they maintain these big secrets and leave them behind when they have to put back on the skin of their normal lives?” says Lisa Williams at the University of New South Wales in Australia, who was not part of the study.
To better understand how secrets affect people’s well-being, Bianchi and her colleagues recruited 240 people online and asked them to fill out a survey about their secrets. Participants indicated whether they had any secrets from 38 categories, including lying, cheating on a partner, stealing, having an addiction or self-harming.
The respondents had an average of nine types of secrets, most often about having told a lie (78 percent of the participants) and feeling dissatisfied with a personal physical aspect (71 percent). Other common secrets related to finances (70 per cent), romantic desires (63 per cent) and sexual behavior (57 per cent).
Then, participants were asked to identify their most important secret and fill in a daily diary for two weeks about how it made them feel. They generally reported that their most important secret was negative, and when they thought about it, their minds wandered to concerns or worries they had about the secret.
Bianchi’s previous research found that important secrets tend to enter people’s minds about once every 2 hours. Often they come to mind “when you’re doing something that doesn’t require all of your attention or all of your cognitive capacity, because your mind has space to go to the secret and consider it,” she says.
The reason we have evolved to keep secrets is probably because, despite being burdensome to the individual, they can support group cohesion. Withholding information can protect ourselves and others from harm, embarrassment or loss of social status. “For example, if you find out that a colleague is being investigated at work, you can choose to keep quiet about it, rather than gossiping with others, to protect their reputation in the organization,” says Bianchi.
In some cases, confessing secrets can bring some relief, says Bianchi. In particular, telling them to people who are not directly affected by their content and who are empathetic, such as denominational ministers or therapists, can help ease their burden, she says.
On the other hand, some secrets cannot be told to anyone else, including top secret information held by intelligence officers. In these cases, it can be helpful for the secret-keeper to talk to someone about how the secret makes them feel, without revealing the actual content, Bianchi says. Alternatively, psychological techniques such as distraction can help, she says. The team now plans to investigate these strategies.
According to Williams, established emotional regulation techniques can also be beneficial. “If you can’t get rid of a secret because it’s part of your job or for other reasons, then you need to do something about the negative feeling you feel about it,” she says. “We know that it’s generally not a good idea to try to ignore or suppress negative feelings, so we can use tools to think about the secret a little differently and try to reframe it positively. Maybe instead of thinking of it as burdensome or worrisome, you can try to think of its positive aspects, like the importance or value of keeping it.”
Another option for people who don’t work in the intelligence field might be to write privately about the secret and how it makes them feel, says James Pennebaker of the University of Texas at Austin, who has previously shown that writing down feelings in a diary is often therapeutic. “My research started by noticing that people who had any kind of major upheaval were far more likely to have health problems if they didn’t talk about those events than if they did,” he says.
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