The average person is keeping nine types of secrets, ranging from having told a lie to covert romantic desires. This can be a major burden, because secrets have the troubling habit of flashing into the mind unbidden. Confessing them can sometimes bring relief, but some secrets are too sensitive to be shared. As a result, researchers are investigating psychological strategies for coping with them.

“You might think about secrets when you’re showering, when you’re doing your dishes or when you’re heading to work,” says Val Bianchi at the University of Melbourne in Australia. “Having these thoughts pop into your mind when you don’t necessarily want them to is often unpleasant, and people seem to get caught in vicious cycles of thinking spontaneously about their secrets as they go about their life, and feeling worse about them.”

Bianchi has spent years investigating the psychological burden of secret-keeping and ways to ease it, with her latest research being funded by the Australian Office of National Intelligence. Intelligence operatives must keep highly sensitive secrets to protect national security, so they need strategies to bear this responsibility, she says.

“This is why so many people are fascinated with CIA agents – how do they maintain these big secrets and leave them behind when they have to put back on the skin of their normal life?” says Lisa Williams at the University of New South Wales in Australia, who wasn’t part of the study.

To better understand how secrets impact people’s well-being, Bianchi and her colleagues recruited 240 people online and asked them to fill out a survey about their secrets. The participants indicated whether they held any secrets from 38 categories, including lying, cheating on a partner, stealing, having an addiction or self-harming.

On average, the respondents held nine types of secrets, most commonly about having told a lie (78 per cent of participants) and feeling unhappy about a personal physical aspect (71 per cent). Other common secrets related to finances (70 per cent), romantic desires (63 per cent) and sexual behaviours (57 per cent).

Next, the participants were asked to identify their most important secret and fill out a daily diary for two weeks about how it made them feel. They generally reported their most important secret to be negative, and when thinking about it, their thoughts wandered to worries or concerns they had about the secret.

Bianchi’s previous research found that important secrets tend to intrude on people’s thoughts about once every 2 hours. Often, they pop into the mind “when you are doing something that doesn’t require all of your attention or all of your cognitive capacity, because your mind has the space to go to the secret and deliberate on it”, she says.

The reason we have evolved to keep secrets is probably because, despite being taxing to the individual, they can support group cohesion. Concealing information can protect ourselves and others from hurt, embarrassment or loss of social standing. “For example, if you find out a colleague is being investigated at work, you might choose to stay silent about it, rather than gossiping with others, to safeguard their reputation within the organisation,” says Bianchi.

In some circumstances, confessing secrets can provide some relief, says Bianchi. In particular, telling them to people who aren’t directly affected by their contents and who are empathetic, like confessional priests or therapists, can help ease their burden, she says.

On the other hand, some secrets cannot be told to anyone else, including top-secret information held by intelligence officers. In these cases, it may be helpful for the secret-keeper to talk to someone about how the secret is making them feel, without disclosing its actual contents, says Bianchi. Alternatively, psychological techniques like distraction may help, she says. The team is now planning to investigate these strategies.

According to Williams, established emotional-regulation techniques may also be beneficial. “If you can’t get rid of a secret because it’s part of your job or for other reasons, then you have to do something about the negative emotion that you feel about it,” she says. “We know it’s generally not a good idea to try to ignore or suppress negative emotions, so we might use tools to think about the secret a little bit differently and try to positively reframe it. Maybe instead of thinking of it as burdensome or worrisome, you might try to think about its positive aspects, like the importance or value of holding it.”

Another option for people who don’t work in the intelligence field may be to write privately about the secret and how it makes them feel, says James Pennebaker at the University of Texas at Austin, who has previously shown that writing down emotions in a diary is often therapeutic. “My research started by noticing that people who had any kind of major upheaval were far more likely to have health problems if they didn’t talk about these events than if they did,” he says.