If you don’t like keeping secrets, you need to start doing so! It’s now proven: holding on to good news improves health. It’s enough to motivate you to hold your tongue on gifts until Christmas.
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Are you one of those people who can keep good news a secret? At Futura, that’s not our case and we have one thing to tell you: keeping positive things about yourself will be good for your health! Until now, scientists were mainly interested in the consequences of enormous mysteries, and the findings were quite sobering: in a study published in 2014 in the journal Journal of Personality and Social PsychologyResearchers had demonstrated that people who hide parts of their personality, or conceal bad news, do not function optimally and show symptoms of exhaustion, lower intellectual performance, and poor health.
In short, the complete opposite of the study we are interested in today has also been published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, This time, researchers at Columbia University conducted five experiments with more than 2,500 people to understand what motivates people to keep positive secrets and what its effects are. Participants were given a list of about 40 types of general good news: savings, major personal purchases, debt reduction, pregnancy, etc.
Five experiments, one result
During the first experiment, they indicated whether or not they were concerned with some of them, and specified which ones they kept for themselves. Next, some participants were asked to think about the shared good news, while others were asked to focus on the secret good news. Ultimately, they had to indicate whether or not they wanted to share their secret with anyone else. The results: Those who kept the good news a secret felt more energetic than those who revealed it. The same is true for those who wanted to share good news with someone.
In another experiment, scientists asked participants to choose from a well-known list of good news the thing that was most likely to happen to them in the near future. Then one group had to imagine that they were waiting until the end of the day to surprise their partner with good news, while the other had to imagine that they could not contact the partner and had to wait until then. Were forced to. End of the day to announce that. As you might expect, those who chose to wait felt more energetic and fit than those forced to wait.
Another interesting experiment: Researchers asked participants to remember a positive secret, a negative secret, or simply a current secret. They found that people keep good news a secret, especially for personal reasons, while bad news is kept a secret because of constraints or external pressures.
In short, keeping the good news a secret can give you a feeling of energy and vitality, and improve your well-being! You might have guessed: We keep our brilliant idea for Christmas to ourselves, not say a word about this surprise dinner you’ve been organizing for weeks, and not in front of a loved one’s puppy dog eyes. Break down who is too eager to open it. His birthday gift!