Markham Heid via Medium:
“Emotions are contagious, and you can impact the emotions of others by sharing how you feel,” Caruso says. He points out that emotions often arise suddenly, can be fleeting, and are dependent on a lot of contextual factors, from how well you slept to how recently you’ve eaten. “How you’re feeling in the moment can be the product of all these unrelated things,” Caruso says. And by expressing what you’re feeling, not only do you pass some of your emotion to others, but you also have to deal with the aftermath of that disclosure.
“The way we’re built, we naturally want to describe what we’re feeling to others, but the reality is that sometimes this would hurt other people or would be embarrassing to us,” says James Pennebaker, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas. And when you share your feelings with someone else, you risk them refuting or rejecting the validity of what you told them, which can be devastating. “In that situation, you may end up worse off than if you’d kept what you were feeling to yourself,” Pennebaker says.