Social Life
The Cost of Keeping Secrets
We all have secrets—but keeping them to ourselves can take a toll.
Updated May 21, 2025 Reviewed by Devon Frye
Secrets. Most of us keep some. But what kind of secrets are commonly kept? And what are the mental health implications of keeping secrets?
Research on that question has been accumulating. A recent (2024) review of the literature by Michael Slepian of Columbia Business School summarizes some of the main conclusions about the secrets people keep in their everyday lives and the experiences they have with their secrets.
What Secrecy Is and Isn't
Early research, Slepian notes, tried to create secrecy situations in the lab, but the results led to some confusion between secrecy and concealment, which are not one and the same. For one, you can inhibit speech and conceal information during conversation for reasons other than keeping a secret (e.g., politeness). Moreover, secrets often do not require active concealment, particularly if they are irrelevant to the topics or participants in the conversation. Secrets, additionally, may exist long before the need to conceal them ever arises.
The author argues that secrecy is best defined not as an action, but as an intention. Such intention is distinguished from general privacy orientation. For example, you may want to keep the details of your sex life private, but the fact that you are sexually active is no secret.
You only have a secret when you intend to hold specific information away from others. That decision may influence you in various ways, even before you are faced with the need to actively conceal the information in conversation.
Secrecy, in other words, involves more than biting your tongue, changing topics, or dodging questions, and may require mental effort both before and after concealment situations. In fact, even the secrets that require no maintenance or active concealment may prove burdensome to the secret keeper.
What Kinds of Secrets Do We Keep?
Research suggests that secrets concerning sexual behavior, extra relational thoughts, lies, and romantic desire are most often concealed from everybody. Pregnancy and abortions, on the other hand, are at the bottom of the total secrecy list.
Slepian argues that secrets are activated in either secret-relevant or “mind wandering” contexts. In the former scenario, the conversation may come around to the area of your secret; in the latter, your mind wanders unprompted and stumbles into an awareness of the secret.
Actively concealing a secret requires some effort, and one would assume that the most frequently concealed secrets would be most taxing on our mental health. The data, however, do not support this idea.
“Concealment can be taxing, but frequent concealment of secrets is not associated with stress.” In fact, research suggests that rather than active concealments, it’s the "mind wandering" occasions that affect us most adversely. “The more frequently people’s minds wander to their secrets (outside of concealment contexts), the more those secrets harm their well-being, with no additional harm observed from frequent concealment.”
So, if your mind often wanders to your secret, then you’re more likely to experience a mental toll. Why would that be? Research suggests a variety of reasons, including increased feelings of shame, isolation, uncertainty, and inauthenticity that may arise from ruminating on a secret. Indeed, excessive rumination has been linked to lower levels of well-being.
Why do people’s minds wander into thinking about their secrets despite the adverse effects of such wandering? One reason is that secrets tend to concern unresolved issues, which our minds are designed by evolution to prioritize. Moreover, to conceal a secret when the situation calls for it, we need to keep the secret top of mind, which may be why we ruminate on it.
Secrets may at times spare us relational conflict and confrontation, yet they often exert a psychological toll, in part because they deprive us of social support and create distance in our relationships. Feelings of guilt are common regarding kept secrets, which increases the emotional burden.
Interestingly, research on the link between secrecy and relationship quality suggests that “poor relationship quality gives rise to harmful secrets more than secrets harm relationships. Secrecy is often less harmful in high-quality relationships, perhaps because “secrecy within healthy relationships more effectively protects the relationship without compromising it.”
The Best Ways to Keep Secrets
Keeping secrets is effortful. How do people cope with keeping secrets? The review suggests that sound emotion regulation skills are useful for the task.
Moreover, we may usefully cope by reflecting on our behavior and imagining a different way to behave in the future, so as to avoid the need for secrecy altogether. Such a focus on problem-solving is preferable, psychologically, to shaming oneself. Finally, you may manage a secret well by focusing on the prosocial aspects of the secrecy (e.g., maintaining social harmony); yet this works only if the secrecy motivation is not primarily selfish.
The review discusses how people tend to evaluate their secrets on three dimensions: morality, relationality, and goal orientation. “Immoral secrets evoke the most shame, secrets low in relationality evoke the most social isolation, and secrets low in goal orientation evoke the most uncertainty.”
Some secrets are excepted from this evaluation, including things like surprises and marriage proposals, which are seen as positive in valence and are experienced as energizing rather than depleting. One reason for the difference is that positive secrets are more often intrinsically motivated, while negative secrets are extrinsically motivated. Extrinsically motivated behavior is linked to reduced well-being.
Should You Share Your Secret?
Effective coping with the stress that often attends secrecy may at certain times entail revealing the secret to the right person, whether through confession (revealing to the target of the secret) or confiding (revealing to a trusted outsider). Both carry risks as well as potential benefits: A confession may damage the relationship. Confiding may elicit a critical, negative response.
Research on confession is scarce. Research on confiding suggests that it is most often beneficial for both the secret keeper and the confidant. Indeed, confiding has elsewhere been shown to be an important coping mechanism against depression.
Confiding tends to work well because people select their confidants carefully. Research suggests that people do not confide randomly but tend to select confidants who are compassionate (i.e., nonjudgmental and empathic) and assertive (willing to provide guidance). Confiding works best when the confidant is compassionate, assertive, has a similar set of morals, and will not become overly burdened by the secret.
The authors conclude: "We all keep secrets at some point in time. And most people right now hold multiple secrets, including those that have been kept for years… We’ve recently learned much about secrecy, but there is still much to be revealed.” Touché...
