
Over the past few years, I have surveyed more than 10,000 people about their secrets. I find that 97% of people are keeping a significant secret at any given time, with the average person having about 13 secrets. Relatively little research has examined how our secrets affect us despite secrecy being incredibly common and consequential, but research on this topic is rapidly growing.
By the age of five, children develop the ability to keep secrets. Keeping a secret from a parent can perhaps prevent a scolding, but more importantly, the ability to keep secrets is a major developmental milestone.
To have a secret from others is to create an alternate world, one to which others don’t have complete access. With the ability to keep a secret, people can seal off an episode from others, protecting their personal information from what could be prying eyes. But this can come at a cost.
During adolescence, keeping secrets from parents is related to greater feelings of autonomy yet also to lower psychological and physical well-being. Likewise, in adults, secrecy is associated with lower well-being and relationship quality.
And this is the bind. We keep secrets to protect ourselves and our relationships, and secrecy can achieve those effects. But keeping secrets can hurt us all the same. But how?
How do our secrets affect us? Psychologists have long thought they knew the answer to this question, but my research suggests they were wrong.
For decades, psychologists assumed that, because concealing a secret requires a good deal of effort, concealment serves as a stressor, over time undermining our psychological well-being and eroding our health. Yet, we should have always been suspicious of this explanation. Concealing a secret does not typically require a great deal of effort.
In the very moment that concealment is required, only children (and that one friend we all have) actually struggle with keeping a secret concealed.
Although our secrets do occasionally slip out, whether from a momentary lapse of attention or a glass too many of wine, we are actually excellent gatekeepers of our secrets. Those things that we don’t want most people to know are the very things that very few people know about us.
The effort involved in keeping a secret hidden from others does not, in itself, appear to be the main problem. In a recent series of studies, my colleagues and I found that the real problem with having secrets is not that we have to hide them, but rather that we have to live with them, and think about them, along with our thoughts.
Healthmatics has a remedy to help this situation. All you need to do is below. Enjoy.
Go and get a big fresh catfish. Use a knife to open the chest of the fish and remove everything inside the stomach.
Now place everything you removed from the fish into a local pot. Put your leaf called Papasan on top of a grinding stone and add a small weed leaf with small negro pepper.
Now grind it together without water and pack everything back inside the stomach of the fish.
To cook the fish, use eagle jin as water to cook the fish adding small palm oil and small salt.
After cooking, remove the pot from the fire and put it on top of the white cloth, carry the pot with the cloth and set it aside to cool down.
This is what you will do, you will eat the cooked fish with prayers to cover my secret by fire by force. The prayer should be directed to the one holding that important secret.
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