Why Not Acting Like Ourselves Wears Us Down

Maybe we sit there and take it, knowing exactly what we want to say yet keeping it inside. It's different for everyone, but our jaw might tighten a little while we nod along or we hear ourselves agreeing to do a favor we really don’t have the time to commit to. Some of us keep working toward a goal we stopped believing in a year ago. Almost all of us do some version of this, big and small, because it seems to be the sensible move most of the time. The meeting wasn't the place, the favor was small, or the goal is nearly achieved anyway.

The trouble is that these choices aren’t as isolated as they might seem. What starts as a reasonable compromise in one situation can transform into a standing arrangement, where the version of us that shows up is misaligned with the version we want to be. That gap between these versions costs us, and its impacts are much broader than just the frustration of holding back what we really want to say.

The Difference Between Compromise and a Standing Gap

Occasional compromise and chronic self-editing are hard to differentiate, but the research treats them as separate animals, and our body seems to as well. Emotional labor, which is the effort we exert to feel the way we think we should feel (i.e. match our emotion to the situation), comes in two different flavors. We can change what we actually feel, working ourselves into genuine interest in the situation or genuine patience with the person we’re dealing with. Alternatively, we can leave how we’re feeling alone and put on a facade to convince everyone around us of what we want them to see, keeping our face steady while the disagreement or the exhaustion sits inside us unchanged.

These two paths lead to very different outcomes. Managing only what we show externally, along with the mismatch between what we feel and what the situation truly calls for, showed substantial links to impaired well-being. Shifting our internal state led to better performance and well-being. The cost doesn't seem to come from the “acting” itself, rather, it seems to be connected to locking how we actually feel deep inside.

A single day of keeping quiet isn't the problem. The problem is when keeping quiet becomes our default and the gap between how we act and who we are never closes.

What Not Acting Like Ourselves Costs Us

Not acting like ourselves and holding a gap between what we feel and what we show outwardly takes physical effort. That effort, if we even notice it in the first place, shows up well below anything we'd normally call stress. In studies on emotion suppression, participants asked simply to keep their expression neutral while watching an emotional movie showed increased heart rate and stress activation patterns. They weren't doing anything obviously strenuous, but they still had to work to keep the emotions inside. Part of what drains our energy is that we have to manage the gap. Managing how we act and respond means running a constant check on ourselves while in the given situation by comparing what we’re expressing with what we’re “supposed” to express. That check doesn't switch off until the interaction does.

The costs tend to show up in our behavior before it shows up anywhere else. We replay the phrase we didn't say but wanted to on the drive home. We go quiet for the rest of a meeting because we were fighting ourselves to keep from saying something we think needs to be said. We read the same message three times without taking it in or we get angry with someone who has nothing to do with what’s actually making us angry. Studies also highlight a negative link with performance along with our behavior, which fits, because the attention spent maintaining the gap has to come from somewhere, and it usually comes out of whatever is in front of us.

When people conceal what they think so as to appear aligned with a group, it can often lead to emotional exhaustion if unaddressed for long enough. It tends to show up in places where speaking up feels unavailable or gets classified as a threat because we see speaking up as a risk to belonging.

Oddly, people are more likely to hide their disagreement when they believe their leader has high integrity. The underlying reason seems to be that a principled leader raises the perceived stakes of dissent, so the safest-looking move is to just agree. The instinct is understandable and hard to fight, but it also leads to the costs of acting differently than we actually want to. 

When We Stop Believing in the Goal

Goals we've stopped believing yet still pursue seem to have similar costs as the ones associated with “being a different person” in public. Research on self-concordance, which means how well a goal fits a person's own interests and values, found that people pursuing goals that fit put more sustained effort in and were more likely to reach them. A second finding is that among people who reached their goals, the people who still believed in them got a much larger boost in their well-being than those who’d lost sight of why they were doing it in the first place.

A goal we no longer believe in tends to cost us twice. It's harder to pursue because we’re effectively forcing ourselves forward rather than being helped and pulled toward the goal itself, and when we finally achieve it, the payoff we were counting on to justify the whole thing often doesn't even happen. This is most visible in physical training, where someone can hold a program together for months leading up to a competition that stopped meaning anything. The workouts still get done, but the effort seems to require more energy and the whole thing starts running on the calendar rather than on the excitement of actually wanting it. Even if it’s not a physical activity, most of us likely have our own version of crossing the finish line and asking why we did it in the first place. The relief of the pursuit being over vastly outweighs succeeding in our endeavor.

What Happens When We Close the Gap

Working to close the gap seems to help. Studies find large improvements in quality of life and reductions in psychological stress, alongside gains in self-efficacy and in hope when people follow structured programs to find meaning again. Increases in meaning predict the drops in distress, which helps show that a gap between how we act and who we want to be is often due to misalignment or feeling lost.

As a note though, most of that research was conducted with people facing serious illness or a major life transition, and results vary considerably across different programs and different groups. What holds for someone in palliative care may not transfer cleanly to someone disengaged from their job, but the evidence seems to point in the same direction just experienced at different intensities.

If holding a gap between our values and our behavior costs something physically, then closing it appears to register physically too. This isn’t to argue that we should say everything we think, as we all likely know that could cost us even more. Most small compromises are fine and some of them are simply kindness. What seems to matter though is how long we suppress how we genuinely feel because a gap we open on purpose and close quickly costs us very little, while one we've been holding for months or years has usually stopped feeling like a choice at all. One that continues to dig a hole we might not even know we’re in.

References

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