31. The Hidden Health Risks of Suppressing Emotions

In this powerful episode of Nourished with Dr. Anikó, Dr. Anikó expands on a key idea raised in last week’s conversation about grief and emotional suppression: the very real and measurable harm that unprocessed emotions create within the body. 

Through research, clinical insight, and lived experience, this episode explores why emotions that aren’t felt don’t disappear they embed themselves physically, increasing inflammation, disrupting hormones, altering the gut microbiome, and raising the long-term risk of conditions like dementia, autoimmune disease, chronic pain, and cancer .

Dr. Anikó breaks down why intellectualizing feelings is not the same as experiencing them, why suppression creates lasting physiological stress, and how adaptive approaches such as cognitive reappraisal can reduce inflammatory load and improve mental resilience . 

Dr. Anikó also explores the gut–brain axis, the role of serotonin production in the gut, and the ways dysbiosis ties emotional patterns to mood, immunity, and cognition .

This episode also widens into a deeper reflection on what it truly means to live a grief-informed life one where emotions become guides rather than threats. Dr. Anikó argues passionately that emotional literacy isn’t weakness but resilience, and that allowing emotions to rise and resolve naturally creates more connection, clarity, and meaning in our daily lives .

What You’ll Learn:
• The scientific links between emotional suppression, inflammation, dementia, chronic pain, and disease
• The difference between feeling emotions and thinking about emotions
• How the gut microbiome and serotonin production respond to stress and suppression
• Why adaptive emotional strategies improve health outcomes
• The importance of a grief-informed approach to life and relationships
• How expressing emotions supports resilience, vitality, and meaningful connection

Whether you're navigating stress, grief, a disconnected relationship with your emotions, or simply want to understand the science of emotional health, this episode offers both insight and invitation. You’ll walk away with a profound understanding of why expression not suppression is essential for long-term wellbeing and authentic connection.

If the last episode cracked the door open, this one swings it wide.

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Website: https://www.draniko.com/

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Disclaimer:
The content of this podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The views expressed are those of the host and guests and do not substitute for professional medical advice. Always seek the guidance of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding your health or a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking it because of something you heard on this podcast.

Transcript

Dr. Anikó: [00:00:00] Hello. Hello y'all, and welcome back to Nourished with Dr. Aniko last week. We had an amazing episode with Ama Alsa, where we talked about grief and emotional suppression. Grief suppression, interconnectedness, living a grief informed life. It was such an expansive and rich conversation, and one part. I felt just really deserve some extra [00:01:00] attention and expansiveness just around that one little part that was mentioned almost in passing about how emotional suppression causes harm to our bodies.

And in this context we were talking about how even when we are trying to kind of get out of feeling these emotions that we don't want to feel, they're not pleasant, they're not fun, and yet when we try to suppress them. They just get felt in our body and they get stuck in our body. And in the conversation, Amar Atma was talking about how there's so much research to support the fact that, you know, emotional suppression can predispose us to autoimmune disease and all kinds of things.

 And so I just wanted to dig a little more deeply into that particular topic today because it is [00:02:00] so true. And in so many ways, so widely known, and yet at the same time, somehow underappreciated and under-recognized as like a true scientific fact that suppressing stress, suppressing anger. Suppressing our emotions instead of allowing our bodies to feel them.

And this is very different like we talked about in the last episode. Please go back to the last episode. If you have not heard it. Like I said, it is so rich. There's so much that happened in that conversation. But one of the things that we talked about is that getting stuck in your story. About the emotional experience rather than just experiencing the emotion in your body.

 Blocks that emotion from just moving through us in our [00:03:00] bodies, right? Because feeling emotions is not an intellectual experience anymore than smelling a roses, right? I mean, you can explain it to somebody, but you experience a rose. Through your nose if you're smelling it, or through your hands if you're touching it.

That is the bodily experience and our attempts to intellectualize our emotions are often a form of suppression. And often don't allow us to actually go through the actual emotional experience in our bodies that would allow that emotion to move through and be released. And so in our efforts to suppress these things that we're like, I don't want to feel angry, I don't want to feel sad, I don't want to feel all these things I'm feeling.

We actually not only get stuck in them, but our body is responding to it whether we want [00:04:00] to realize it or not. And our body can respond in ways like chronic inflammation, hormonal imbalances, Gut dysbiosis, which is when the. Microbiome in our gut. So all those bacteria and microbes that live in our gut that help us digest things.

Dysbiosis is when there's an imbalance in that microbiome that has negative effects on our health suppressed. Emotions and rage can cause increased risk of depression and anxiety. And so these are really significant impacts and I wanted to get a little bit into the research today and then also a little bit into.

Kind of what's been reverberating for me since that conversation in the last episode of Living a Grief Informed Life. Because when you just say a [00:05:00] grief informed life, it feels a little bit like what does that even mean? And so I'm just gonna dig into that a little bit in this episode so we can talk about.

Moving into a space where our grief is informing our life in a way that helps us be more alive and directs our life towards what really is meaningful to us individually in our lives. So an interesting study that I came across was from 2020 and it looked at 1,137 people, so about 1100 people, 

And found that those people who suppress their emotions were more likely to develop dementia and Alzheimer's disease, meaning that people who suppress their emotions, emotional suppression, [00:06:00] appears to be associated with an increased risk of developing dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

Another 2020 study found that suppression, emotional suppression was significantly associated with higher levels of the inflammatory index. So when we say it's significantly associated, that means that this is. Almost a hundred percent. Not fully a hundred percent because that's not how science works, but it's almost certainly an accurate result of this study as opposed to something happening by coincidence.

just to say it again, that emotional suppression. Was significantly associated with higher inflammation. So, so far we have studies that are showing us that suppressing our emotions, make us more likely to develop [00:07:00] dementia, Alzheimer's disease, and having higher levels of inflammation, which we know that inflammation underlies the development of so many, if not all disease processes.

So. In this study, they talked about maladaptive strategies for dealing with your emotions. So that's like expressive suppression. So that means that instead of expressing your emotions, you just suppress it. But then there's also. Adaptive strategies for dealing with your emotions, and those were found in studies to be more effective.

 And one of those is cognitive reappraisal, which means changing your thoughts about the meaning of that experience or that emotion. So instead of just suppressing it. You might approach it from a different angle, but again, not to get out of the [00:08:00] feeling, but maybe to approach it from a more expansive lens.

And y'all know from previous episodes of mine that I am not a silver linings person. I'm certainly not a find the positive in every single thing person. And in fact, I find that that gets in the way of genuinely finding meaning in situations that were genuinely bad. Like no spin zone kind of situation, right?

We're not putting a positive spin on anything, but we are perhaps finding the meaning in a situation that was very difficult. Or we are perhaps looking at a situation or an emotional experience from a different lens or angle.

And this comparison of adaptive strategies like cognitive reappraisal, which we just talked about versus emotional suppression, was looked at [00:09:00] in a 2021 study that looked at veterans who had PTSD. And they found that the people who suppressed their emotions, so emotional suppression, was related to higher levels of inflammation in the body that was independent of their PTSD.

So it was people that had similar PTSD severity, but the inflammation was higher in the folks who. Suppress their emotions, and not just that it was higher in those folks, it was related to their emotional suppression, and they found that cognitive reappraisal, which is that approaching thing from a different angle, was unrelated to inflammation.

So their conclusion. Was that their findings suggested that when we overutilize overuse those maladaptive strategies, like just suppression, suppression, suppression, put it in a box. Don't think about it. Meanwhile, your body's experiencing [00:10:00] it, whether you're aware of it or not. You may have put it out of your mind, but it lives on in your body, right?

So when we overuse those maladaptive strategies like suppression and we underuse the adaptive ones, that in ways help us process it, that causes more inflammation in our bodies, specifically how we deal with our emotions.

And we talked about dysbiosis. So there was a study in 2024 that determined that stress causes dysbiosis. So remember the microbiome being imbalanced in a way that isn't good for our health. Stress causes that dysbiosis via a mitochondrial pathway that we don't have to get into. But you know, I would love to, and this gut [00:11:00] dysbiosis has been implicated, so found to be related to the development of things like IBS, which is pretty straightforward, but also things like anxiety and depression.

And cognitive changes, right? So things like dementia, executive function, so things that aren't as obvious. One thing that I will say is that, you know, you think of SSRIs and how they are used for depression and mood. Well, one thing a lot of people don't know outside of the medical world is that the largest percentage of.

Serotonin. So SSRIs are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. So they impact serotonin, they reduce how much your body takes back up, so there's more kind of flowing around in those synapses between your neurons, so they can hopefully have a positive effect on mood. Okay, quick and dirty right there Anyway, [00:12:00] the place in your body where you have the most serotonin.

Made is in the gut. So estimates vary between 90 and 95% of the serotonin in your body is made by the gut. So when you think about that and you think about the microbiome and how the microbiome impacts digestion. And then other functions of your gastrointestinal system, it makes more sense that impacting your microbiome would also impact your mood, your cognition, and all of these things that we don't immediately connect with the gut or the gastrointestinal system.

And it also makes sense. That gut related issues, especially functional ones where it's the

function of the organ that has a problem, so it's not the [00:13:00] organ itself. If you do like a colonoscopy, it'll look absolutely normal. The tests are normal. When we're looking at the organ itself, but the function of the organ is not normal. And back in the day, they thought IBS was kind of all in your head because they would give people antidepressants and SSRIs and people would get better, and so that was their explanation for, well, it's actually not a real thing because you're getting better with antidepressants, but there is so much serotonin in the gut.

And also this interplay of stress and inflammation and all of that is so much more complex that now it feels laughable. To think that an antidepressant helping a gut issue would mean that you wrote that gut issue off as just all being in someone's head. And yet when this was all happening, we didn't have [00:14:00] as deep of an understanding about how everything works together in the body.

And that understanding just deepens and deepens as time goes on. I mean, one thing about science and medicine that is super exciting is that we are learning more and more and more about how things work. As time goes on and we just have to work with the picture that we have at the time. And when we learn more, we do things differently, or it might

just reaffirm what we've been doing in the first place. So anyway, just a quick aside about that, but just to highlight. How massively important the microbiome is for our overall health, and we're just talking about serotonin here. There are lots of other hormones, really important ones that are made in the gut, and the microbiome does impact the [00:15:00] function of the cells that make those hormones. 

 And there are studies showing that there are certain probiotics that when taken can improve stress and anxiety, and there's something called the gut brain axis. Which is this complex bidirectional communication network that links your central nervous system to your GI tract, and it influences our overall health, our emotions and behavior.

So the microbiome has a hugely important role in our overall health. But you may remember that we didn't start this conversation to talk about the microbiome specifically. We were talking about it in regards to how our emotional suppression or expression can impact our health. If our emotional suppression can [00:16:00] cause dysbiosis and we know that there is this bidirectional gut brain axis that is communicating with our central nervous system, we start to get a sense of how much.

Our habits around either suppressing or expressing our emotions can really impact our overall health. And just in case you are not fully convinced, I'm gonna share a little more research. So in the world of cancer, there's evidence to show that suppressed anger can be a precursor to the development of cancer.

And it's also a factor in its progression after diagnosis. So not only. Increases your risk of developing cancer, but also its progression. Pain. So suppression of anger may be linked to heightened pain, both pain reports and pain behavior. [00:17:00] And this is relatively well studied specifically in chronic low back patients.

Another study again on people who have chronic low back pain showed that when those people tried to suppress anger, it actually aggravated their pain. Ironically through increased feelings of anger as they try to suppress their anger, it impacts blood pressure. So there was a study done on college males, and they basically had them experience kind of a threat.

Threatening situation, and those people who suppressed their anger and who were in that high threat situation had the biggest increases in their blood pressure and their heart rate change from resting. So their heart rate and blood pressure went up higher than the people who didn't suppress their anger, which has [00:18:00] implications, right?

If you think about this chronic suppression of emotions. Anger specifically that your blood pressure is going to go up more if you are suppressing your anger than if you're just releasing it, which makes sense when we talk about the body experiencing what you are trying to shut out of your mind. Poor health outcomes.

So just a more general thing in some studies. Emotion suppression was shown that it may be linked to poor health outcomes because of that increased stress related physiology, right? So even when we think about just a higher blood pressure, it makes sense that if you are chronically experiencing higher blood pressure and heart rate responses to threat situations.

Over time, that's going to have a worse health outcome than if you didn't have that response. There's also negative social impact, [00:19:00] so people who suppress their emotions. We're shown to have lower levels of social support, close relationships, and social satisfaction. And again, this is that the suppression of the emotion was significantly associated with that.

Not just that we observe that, oh, hey. People who suppress their emotions also have lower social support, et cetera. Actually, in this study, it was shown to be associated with that and quality of life. So in studies, people who suppress their emotions experience less positive emotions, worse relationship, and a reduced quality of life.

And in this study they showed that those who tend to reappraise. So we talked about that cognitive reappraisal showed an opposite pattern, and in that particular study, suppression was also associated with a blunted reward responsivity, which [00:20:00] means that when good things happened, you were less responsive to that too.

So even though we go into it thinking, I'm just gonna block out anger, I'm just gonna block out sadness, I'm just gonna block out this stuff I don't like, we end up blunting and blocking all of this stuff, all of the stuff that connects us to our lives to one another that makes our lives meaningful and makes us be able to be there for each other.

Because if you can't be with your own emotions. How the heck are you gonna be with anybody in their emotions? And that's gonna block our connection with one another. And it reminds me of, um, this episode in one of my favorite shows, 30 Rock. And if you don't watch that show, uh, there is this character named Jack Donnay and he is this alpha dude business guy all [00:21:00] about.

Kind of gaining more power and control and money, and someone is asking him about his life and his feelings, and he says, I just crush it in my mind, vice like he's just gonna crush those feelings in his mind. And at the end of the episode, he has the breakdown, which is, you know. Pretty true to life, right?

We don't have a mind vice. We can't just decide that we're gonna crush our feelings and they're gonna go away. They might go out of our awareness, but they still live on in our body. And as we can see from all of these studies, they create real damage and real consequences. And there's a really interesting.

Culture related anger syndrome in Korea, and it's called hua. And I hope I'm saying that at least a tiny bit correctly. [00:22:00] And it is known, recognized to occur due to the continued repression of anger, and it's translated as fire illness in English because the physical symptoms are ones of heat, which, you know, anyone that's gotten angry knows, I mean.

Anger is a fiery emotion and there are bodily experiences, so there's like chest tightness and dry mouth and respiratory congestion, as well as emotional symptoms. And the risk factors are being a middle class, middle aged woman having stress because of marital conflicts and conflicts with in-laws and.

People who experience this are typically more attuned to their physical symptoms, which are socially acceptable rather than their psychological symptoms, which are not socially acceptable. [00:23:00] And this is a syndrome that's specific to. People in Korea and people of Korean heritage, but that concept of physical symptoms being socially acceptable and psychological symptoms not being socially acceptable is something that certainly goes beyond the borders of Korea.

And what's more this idea? Of physical symptoms and psychological symptoms. Somehow having some make believe division is also false. I mean, mind, body, spirit, it's all one thing, right? When we think about all of these studies that we just went through, all of these syndromes, they're evidence that what our.

Emotional experience [00:24:00] is impacts our body, our mind, our spirit, and maybe being is just a better way to describe it. But when we try to separate psychology from physicality. It's really an artificial distinction. It's not actually distinct because anyone will tell you your level of stress affects your pain.

That's true. Whether you have functional abdominal pain, back pain, or you have a cut on your leg, right? Your. Emotional regulation and your calmness in a situation will impact your pain experience. That doesn't mean the pain isn't real, it just means that there's all these pathways going on in your body that are impacting your experience of pain, that are literally impacting your physical responses within your body.

And so this [00:25:00] idea that somehow. Physical experiences are acceptable and psychological ones are not. I mean, just strikes me as this desperate attempt to control things and categorize things in a way to make them manageable, right? Because so many people will say, I can deal with physical pain. I can't deal with emotional pain and the truth of the matter.

Is that it's both and all the time. And whether or not you think you can deal with emotional pain, it behooves us to build that practice up because you are dealing with it whether you want to or not, and in suppressing it, you are not opening yourself up to learning from [00:26:00] it. And that's where the grief informed life becomes really powerful and poignant for me is this idea that you're not only opening yourself up to the experience of your emotions, even just the awareness of your emotions, right?

Because some of us don't even have an awareness that we're having the emotion. And yet, as we spoke about in the last episode, our emotions are simply communicators. Our anger is telling us that something unfair is happening. Our grief is telling us that that is something that we love, and if we allow ourselves to be aware.

Of these emotions and take it a step further and actually feel them. Right. We talked last week, Amma was saying that it takes about 90 seconds to go through a wave of [00:27:00] emotion. That's not a lot of time. It seems so scary as we're. Thinking about experiencing it, but the experience itself, if we allow it to just be a bodily experience, is absolutely survivable.

It's okay. And when we start to let our emotions inform our lives, then we start to make choices to create a life that really matters to us. To stand up in the face of injustice, to build a life around what we love, and those griefs don't have to be losing a loved one. It can be a sentimental item getting broken.

And maybe that teaches you how much you cherished that relationship of that person who gave it to you, or that moment that it reminded you of. It can be losing a [00:28:00] job or an opportunity and that makes you realize that, wow, you really, you really cared about that thing. And then you move a little bit more in that direction, allowing these feelings to.

Bloom and wither, as Amma puts, it allows them not only to lead your life, but then not be imprisoned in your body where they are going to cause disease. I mean, we've just gone through all these studies where the research reflects this truth that suppressed emotion causes disease, and one of the things we do need to shift.

Is our fear of one another's emotions, our fear that it's permanent, right? If someone's angry or sad, it's like, oh, I gotta fix it. It has to go away. It's 90 seconds. Let them be sad, but let them be sad. Starts with, let me be [00:29:00] sad. And so I hope this episode inspires you in a big way to start to become aware of your emotions.

If you haven't been to start to at least notice what comes up for you in conversations about emotions. 'cause it might, that might be your starting point. You might have some judgements that come up like, oh, these weak people who can't crush their emotions in their mind. Vice like me and Jack Dony. A lot of things can come up.

It's all information for you. It's all informative. And when you can learn to ride all of those waves of life, that's real strength. That's real resilience, and that is how we show up for one another for the world and for ourselves. Because one wonderful thing that we also see in the research. Is that expressing your [00:30:00] emotions can reduce your stress, anxiety, and even in some studies depression.

So there are real health benefits to start shifting a pattern of expression instead of suppression. So take good care all. I'll see you next time and I hope. That this awakens a little bit of awareness and helps you deepen both your love in life, your joy in life, and your connections with the people and the world around you.

Thank you so much for listening to Nourish Today. Your presence is truly felt and so deeply appreciated. I hope today's episode brought you some insight and also some inspiration to create an even better life and world for [00:31:00] yourself and for your community. If you enjoyed this episode, please don't forget to follow the podcast and leave a review and please share Nourish with a friend.

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