The Silent Habit That's Making You Feel More Alone

Johanna is sharing a conversation from The Model Health Show — Shawn Stevenson sitting down with Harvard Business School professor Dr. Leslie John, whose new book Revealing makes the case that most of us are holding back far more than we should. Not the dramatic stuff — the everyday things we swallow, edit, and never say. And it's quietly doing damage to our relationships, our health, and how connected we actually feel to the people around us.

🤩TThe Model Health Show — The Science of Oversharing with Dr. Leslie John

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-model-health-show/id640246578?i=1000769745720

Transcript

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Swing through the ease with legging. Mid life's golden honey or nobody's falls. Got the fire side where I'm not shine. This is a time. Women all in midlife. Just do A and C.

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Comment sing along. Hello, my friends, and welcome back to Not Your Mother's Midlife. I am your host, Joanna, and today we are talking about something that I think sits right at the heart of so many things that we have to navigate. Our relationships, our sense of connection, and what happens when we consistently hold back. I'm sharing an episode from the Model Health Show, Sean Stevenson, and he's sitting down with Dr. Leslie John, a professor at Harvard Business School and Behavioral Science, whose research focuses on how people make decisions around sharing and withholding information. The core idea of this episode is that most of us assume that the risk in conversation is saying too much, but Dr. John's research points the other way. The thing that's actually doing quiet damage to our relationships, to our health, to how close we feel to other people is all the stuff that we're not saying. How many times today did something cross your mind that you chose to keep to yourself? A feeling that you let pass, something you almost said to your partner, your friend, or your kid, or something vulnerable that you pulled back from because you weren't sure how it'd be received. Well, Dr. John says that habit, that constant editing of ourselves, it carries a cost that most of us don't register until the distance it creates has already built up. If you know me, I don't suffer from this. I'm like the Olympic gold medalist of oversharing. But I know so many people who keep thoughts, feelings, and ideas to themselves. Some because they are afraid of judgment, some are worried about overburdening those close to them, and some just feel too vulnerable. I have always had an uncanny ability to make people open up and spill their thoughts. I just ask a lot of questions and I'm truly interested in other people. I am like a thought and feeling laxative, I guess. Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Dr. John talks about the physiological cost of holding things in, and it's not just emotional. There's a physiological element to suppressing thoughts and feelings. The body is doing work to keep things contained, and that work has real effects over time. One thing that I found very interesting about her research is what she found out about how revealing actually lands on other people. Most of us assume that if we show something vulnerable, like a fear or an insecurity, something we're not proud of, people will think less of us. But her research consistently finds the opposite. People who reveal something real tend to make better impressions, not a worse one. Because when you show someone that you trust them enough to be honest, they tend to trust you back. And it signals something about your character that the more careful managed self-presentation doesn't. She also looks at what happens when someone is in a position of authority or high status that is vulnerable. And again, the results push against what we would expect. It doesn't undermine their credibility. In most cases, it strengthens it. The person seems more human, more trustworthy, more real. There's a concept she introduces called TLI, too little information, which she frames as the counterpart to TMI, too much information. We've all absorbed the idea that oversharing is the social sense to avoid, but she makes the case that undersharing is at least as common and often more damaging, particularly in close relationships where the people involved have started assuming they know what the other person is thinking. We've all been there. She calls that mind-reading expectation. The assumption that the people close to you already know how you feel, so why say it they don't? And that gap between what we assume is understood and what is actually being communicated is where a lot of relationships quietly erode. There's a gender piece in here too. Men and women tend to approach self-disclosure differently. What they share, who they share it with, how they frame it. And in midlife, especially when relationships are often under pressure from all directions, understanding that gap really does matter and it does help. She also gets into EQ or emotional intelligence and how it relates to our ability to reveal. And she covers the big five personality traits and which one is most strongly linked to a person's tendency to open up. The practical part is what I found most useful and you will too. She offers a framework, questions to ask yourself before you decide whether to share something, not a checklist, more a way of reading the room honestly. Is this the right context? Is this person someone who can receive this? What am I actually afraid will happen? Because a lot of what stops us isn't a real risk. It's a habit of self-protection that we built up a long time ago and we never truly examined it. She ends with two sentence starters. Simple things you can complete to begin practicing this. I'll let you hear those from the episode itself, and of course, like usual, I will link the episode in the show notes. So what I took from all of this, especially for women our age, midlife tends to bring a particular kind of loneliness. Not always the obvious kind, the kind where you're surrounded by people and still feel like nobody really knows where you're at. And a big part of that is because we've spent decades getting very good at managing how we present ourselves. Dr. John's research suggests the antidote isn't dramatic. It's just saying a little more of what's actually true, a little more often. So thank you for listening. If you've enjoyed this, please share it with a friend and share it on your social media. It might actually help somebody else, and it will definitely help me to grow my followers. Drop your thoughts or ideas for future episodes, I'd love to hear from you. And subscribe, subscribe to this podcast, and go over and subscribe to my YouTube channel where there's lots of fun videos. You'll see the links in the show notes. And until next week, I'm Joanna, and this is Not Your Mother's Midlife. Bye bye.