How to Keep a Secret (according to a Harvard psychologist)

I think this is a great article. Keeping a secret is great for self esteem. Find a secret you can keep (nothing bad, just something you can NOT tell someone) and keep it. Notice how you feel and how that is a different feeling than when you tell it to someone.

Dantalion Jones

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http://www.ethiopianreview.com/articles/18062

When there’s an elephant in the room staring you down, it can be hard to refrain from acknowledging it. You try to put it out of your mind, but the harder you think about not thinking about it, the larger it looms.

I’m talking about mastering the basic irony of human willpower. People demonstrate incredible capabilities to not spill delicious secrets or avoid eating fried food or shun cigarettes after a stressful day. But as everyone knows, not succumbing to the vices you genuinely wish to best, i.e. gossiping, unhealthy eating or smoking, can be a tooth-and-nail fight for control over the mind.

Wired.com recently posted an interview with Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner who has studied these “ironic processes” of the human brain. In a nutshell, Wegner has identified, via brain imaging, the struggle between conscious (”I can’t tell this secret, even though I really want to”) and unconscious mental impulses (letting the secret slip out) that fuel those so-called ironic processes. Essentially, when we’re under a lot of stress, those unconscious impulses kick into high gear (referred to as hyperaccessibility) and place our conscious efforts at a disadvantage. Wegner and other have documented this correlation between conscious secret-telling suppression and the unconscious mental recall of said secret in multiple studies.

What Wegner and associates have discovered in terms of mastering our secret-keeping and willpower in general largely boils down to a few pieces of practical advice:

• Stay sober — alcohol diminishes willpower (shocker!).
• De-stress — stress inhibits conscious mind control and facilitates hyperaccessibility, hence spillage of secrets.
• Write it down — Got a juicy tidbit ripe for the telling? Jot it down in a private journal. Experiments have found that expressing the mental obstacle helps eliminate the potential for an ironic process.

Or perhaps avoid hush-hush situations to begin with. Wegner also points out that an illicit love affair can be steamy just by virtue of the secrecy involved. In that case, it’s probably a secret not worth keeping.