Are you harboring a secret from a spouse, lover, close friend or boss? If you are — and almost everyone keeps secrets, large or small — you may be experiencing negative health effects from thinking about them, according to a study published recently in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The harm is not connected specifically to the nature of the secret, but rather that people tend to think about whatever it is they’re keeping hush-hush, which leads them to feel inauthentic, says Michael Slepian, an assistant professor of management at Columbia Business School and a co-author of the study, “The Experience of Secrecy.”

In the study, Slepian and other researchers asked more than 2,000 participants a series of questions about their secrets and the effects of keeping them. The study defines secrecy not as active concealment, but an intention to keep information secret even when the person from whom the information is being kept is not physically present. The researchers analyzed the effects of more than 13,000 secrets the study participants kept. The research suggests that when people mask who they are or what they’ve done, they have feelings of inauthenticity that are associated with a lower quality of relationships and lower satisfaction levels with their personal connections, Slepian says in an interview.

“What seems to be hard about secrets isn’t hiding them, but living with and thinking about them,” Slepian says. When people need to conceal a secret, they can, and suspect they can then “move on,” Slepian says. Instead, people frequently think about their secrets even when the secrets are irrelevant to their current task, the study found. This is true with small secrets, like an excuse to get out of a social event, and with big secrets, such as infidelity, the study found. While people who’ve cheated on their spouse or partner do at times have to actively conceal their betrayal, it’s more common that they think about their fraudulent acts when their significant other isn’t around, according to the research.

[See: 9 Ways to Fight Loneliness.]

Feeling Fraudulent

Thinking about such secrets this way can lead to people feeling inauthentic, which creates emotional distance between the person with a secret and his or her loved ones, Slepian says. This leads to less satisfying relationships, which is harmful to one’s emotional health, he says. Keeping secrets can also be detrimental to your job performance, the researchers suggest. “Along with a diminished sense of well-being and physical health consequences, keeping secrets can also shift a person’s focus from the task at hand to their secrets, which clearly can have a detrimental effect on task performance,” Malia Mason, co-author of the study and associate professor of management at Columbia Business School, said in a press statement.

The idea that secrets can be harmful to your well-being is an important concept in the recovery community. One tenet of many 12-step recovery programs is the concept that “You’re only as sick as your secrets.” Nikki Nance, a master addiction counselor and assistant professor in the psychology department at Beacon College in Leesburg, Florida, explains: “It means that your public self may look OK and you may be able to ‘talk the talk’ [of a recovery program like Alcoholics Anonymous] but if you don’t resolve your deep secrets, you can be miserably sober. If the secrets drive you to relapse, you die of addiction, so the secret will have killed you.” Indeed, a related slogan in 12-step programs is “Your secrets will kill you.”

Holding on to secrets can make it difficult for some people with substance use disorders to change their behavior and quit using alcohol, drugs or stop whatever self-destructive behavior, such as compulsive sex, they’re engaging in, says Dr. Joseph Lee, medical director for the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation’s Youth Continuum based in Minneapolis. “With addiction, secrets are really dangerous,” he says. “Sometimes secrets are lies we tell about ourselves so we don’t have to change. Secrets can be used to justify the status quo, which can be very unhealthy.” For example, some patients in drug and alcohol treatment centers might lowball the amount of alcohol or drugs they consumed to minimize or hide their alcoholism or addiction. This kind of secret “gets in the way of growth and change,” Lee says.

[See: 11 Simple, Proven Ways to Optimize Your Mental Health.]

Health Implications

In addition to making you feel inauthentic, keeping a secret can lead to anxiety, stress and depression, says Dr. Anne Gilbert, a psychiatrist and director of the Behavioral Health Care Center at Indiana University Health. Harboring secrets can also cause blood sugar levels to spike, quicken your heart rate and contribute to gastrointestinal distress, Gilbert says.

Experts recommend these strategies for minimizing the negative effects of harboring secrets:

Don’t act impulsively. “We typically do things we wouldn’t want people to know when we act impulsively, prioritizing short-term gains or pleasure over long-term consequences,” says Dr. Daniel Z. Lieberman, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at George Washington University in the District of Columbia. For example, a college student who’s exhausted writing an academic paper takes a shortcut and plagiarizes, or a married man has a brief affair with a woman on a business trip. To avoid making rash choices, imagine how your life might be a month into the future if you act on your impulses, Lieberman advises.

Assess yourself honestly. “Do you spend a lot of time trying to cover something up or trying to appear a certain way to other people?” Lee says. If so, you may be trying to present a narrative of your life that’s inauthentic and not aligned with your core values, he says. One of the steps in 12-step programs recommends people take a “searching and fearless” moral inventory of themselves, assessing their “character defects” in writing and courageously chronicling their past. Character defects include such traits as pride, lust, gluttony, fear and sloth.

Admit your transgressions. Acknowledging your secrets to a trusted person can help you expiate your negative feelings about it and move forward, Gilbert says. In 12-step groups, it’s recommended that people in recovery admit “to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.” In 12-step programs, the person you admit your past misbehavior to could be an Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor or another trusted member of the program.

[See: 11 Strategies for Staying Sober While Traveling.]

Be careful who you share your secrets with. Outside the world of recovery, you have a wide array of people you can confide in. Depending on the nature of your secret or secrets, parents, siblings, close friends, spiritual advisers, clergy members, counselors and psychiatrists or psychologists could be good choices for disclosure, Gilbert says. People should take great care in who they confide in and try not to harm others, she says. For example, admitting a past one-night stand or affair to a spouse might make you feel better in the moment but could cause great emotional damage to your wife or husband. Don’t overburden someone with your secret. For example, confiding that you were sexually abused as a child to someone who was abused himself or herself in the past could create emotional distress for that person. “There are other people [including health care professionals] who can listen to and absorb another’s emotions without feeling drained themselves,” Gilbert says.

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How Your Secrets Can Damage and Maybe Even Kill You originally appeared on usnews.com