Venting Feels Good But Harms Your Health, Study Finds

When something painful happens, it's as if life has fired an arrow at you. The pain of negative experiences is unavoidable, but you may endure extra suffering depending on how you react. If you react with anguish, despair, or frustration, according to the Buddha, it's as if you've fired a second arrow at yourself.

People feel compelled to talk to others about their negative experiences — the more intense the emotion, the more they want to talk about it — but Dr. Ethan Kross, in Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It, explains that doing so excessively ends up pushing away the people we need most. And when our internal conversations frequently activate our threat system over time, they send messages to our cells that trigger the expression of inflammation genes, meant to protect us in the short term but causing harm in the long term.

The author tried the opposite route: at 22, after reading Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, he decided to suppress his emotions, believing emotions were for the weak. It worked for a little while, but he numbed himself to people crossing his boundaries and increasingly couldn't understand what he really wanted out of life or who he was. Swinging between extremes — anger issues versus numbing his emotions — meant shooting himself with the second arrow either way. He writes that specific practices, like meditation, lay the foundation for mental skills, just as playing a sport for years builds muscle memory that isn't forgotten. Learning the skill of recognizing pain and avoiding firing a second arrow at himself, he says, has saved him a tremendous amount of suffering.