6 Signs You’re Bottling Up Your Emotions

Do you find yourself mindlessly scrolling through instagram or guilty binge watching netflix? The tell-tale sign of suppressing your emotions is avoidance. You engage in self-destructive behaviors like drinking or smoking.

You try to escape by-

• Watching TV
• Playing videogames
• Oversleeping

In order to avoid thinking about how you feel.

Bottling up your emotions can create a divide between who you think you are and how others see you. You might feel exhausted, anxious or jaded in private ,but your friends might see you as confident and calm.

If you avoid expressing yourself you might feel like you have two separate faces and that no one truely knows you, perhaps you're not sure yourself who you are.

If you suppress yourself you might think that crying or screaming is embarrassing or bad, but more subtly you'll just feel uncomfortable around highly emotional people who visibly express their emotions.

 You might struggle with how to react or how to offer comfort to them in their time of distress, especially if emotions hold a sort if stigma and pain for you especially.

Maybe you are at a mall with your friend and everyone is having fun, but you feel as if you are observing the fun, rather than fully engaging in it and feel distant. You may also find intimacy difficult and have only a few close friends.

By bottling up your emotions you distance yourself from how you feel. It makes not only anger and sadness hard to express but also expressing happiness and joy.

Perhaps you feel powerless over your own life. You're unable to think deeply about your emotions nor can you talk to others about they make you upset. Even if you bottle your emotions, you can still feel angry and sad, but instead of finding the cause of the negativity , you numb yourself to the pain.

You fear any sort of confrontation and you avoid your emotions just like you avoid emotional people

Psychologist Perpetua Neo explains that: emotions shouldn't be so fear inducing. They exist for a reason. Infact, she calls them our "first intel in a war", beacuse they often a sign that something is wrong and needs fixing.

 You can learn to let in your emotions and use them to identify changes that need to be made in your life.