When I started this newsletter, I thought I would share mostly about how I like to cold plunge and do sauna and eat healthy and how to sleep better and blah blah blah. Stuff you can hear at every corner of the internet.

What I’m increasingly convinced of is a corner of the market few people speak of. The hidden things that absolutely impact our health and happiness.

Like saying what we want.

I’ve become aware of a phenomenon that is affecting more people around me than I could have ever imagined. So many of us are afraid to reveal who we really are.

We hold in our emotions, our feelings, our opinions, hoping to keep the peace. For years I thought that was the generous thing to do. The mature thing.

Here’s why I’ve changed my mind on that…

Researchers paired up women who had never met, showed them a hard documentary, then asked them to talk about it. One woman in each pair was quietly told to keep her feelings off her face. She did it well. Her partner never guessed.

But the partner’s blood pressure went up. She felt less connected. She was less interested in ever talking to that woman again. And she could not have told you why.

You can hide the feeling. You cannot hide it from the person sitting across from you. Their body knows before they do.

So keeping the peace does not make peace. It just moves the war somewhere quieter.

We have a male crisis unfolding all around us. Men are underemployed, unemployed, not feeling fulfilled, with few to no real friends. And plenty of us keep all that rage and sadness to ourselves.

Here is what I think holding it in actually buys you.

Researchers had 180 people watch films, some sad and some funny, while keeping their faces completely still. The sadness did not budge. Same amount, start to finish. What dropped was the amusement. The funny parts stopped being funny.

That is the trade. You do not get less angry. You get less delighted. You keep the heavy stuff and lose the light stuff, and one day you notice nothing lands like it used to.

So find someone to share your thoughts with. I dare not say feelings or emotions, for fear of scaring you. But you need someone to bounce ideas off of, or your happiness and your relationships are going to suffer. I wrote a few weeks back about failing a friend, and I am still sitting with that one.

Ideally you need another man. There is only so much a female partner can carry, and us guys think our lady can and should be all things to us. Until it is too late.

One more thing. Researchers have a scale for how much a person silences himself to keep a relationship going. A 2026 review pulled together three decades of it. Of the studies comparing men and women, not one found women scoring higher. Nineteen found men scored higher.

We are not the strong silent type. We are just the silent type.

You already know the dance. You have run it a hundred times before you open your mouth. If I say this, I am difficult. If I ask for this, I am high maintenance. If I keep count out loud, I am keeping score. If I tell them to do this, I’m bossy.

So you carry it instead. Silently.

I want to show you the actual math on that fear, because researchers have run it. Across 63 studies, a woman who states plainly what she wants does take a hit on likability. It is real, and it is small. Across 31 studies measuring whether people judged her any good at her job, the effect was zero. Not small. Zero.

Read that again. People may warm to you a little less. They do not think less of you.

And here is what actually goes unsaid in most houses, and it is not a want. It is the noticing. Who remembers the dentist. Who tracks the shoe sizes. Who knows the field trip form is due Thursday. That work has no name, so naming it feels like complaining about nothing.

Which puts you in a trap I want to acknowledge. In a house where you are often already carrying the invisible work, the asking is one more piece of invisible work. You have to notice it, find the words, pick the moment, and then manage how it lands. That is not a conversation. That is a project. No wonder it stays on the list.

Gabor Maté has a list of the stories we tell ourselves to keep quiet, and I continue to hear more and more. If I say no, I am not lovable. I am responsible for how other people feel. It is selfish to say no. It is not loving to have anger.

So let me take one thing off you. Going quiet is usually not a flaw in you. Researchers keep landing in the same place: people go silent in rooms that are not fair and relationships where they are not heard. It is a read of the room, and it is usually accurate.

The room has to change too. That part was never your job alone. And some advice I told a female friend a few months ago - if you keep encountering these petty women in rooms you walk into - maybe you’re in the wrong rooms.

Everything above is well supported. This next part is not, and I would rather be honest than not.

The following ideas are hotly contested. Some are single studies nobody followed up on. One fell apart when better researchers looked again. I am listing them because I suspect there is something real underneath, and because I would like someone to go find out.

Gabor Maté has spent decades arguing a version of this. In The Myth of Normal he writes that time after time it was the nice people, the ones who put everyone else first and swallowed their so-called negative emotions, who showed up in his practice with chronic illness. He is describing thirty years of watching patients. That is not nothing, and it is also not proof. I think he is onto something the studies have not caught yet.

Does holding it in shorten your life? One study followed 729 Americans for twelve years. The ones who habitually kept their feelings to themselves were somewhat more likely to die in that window.

Does bottling it up stress the body? Individual lab studies keep finding that holding a feeling in raises your stress response. Then a meta-analysis of 78 studies found the effects small and scattered all over the place. What is true?

The one that got corrected, and got more interesting. Years ago a study went around saying couples who bottle up anger die sooner. Then the same team went back to the same 192 couples with 32 years of data. Holding anger in, by itself, predicted nothing. What did predict earlier death was the mismatch — one spouse swallowing it while the other let it out. Not the silence. The gap between you.

1. Ask Maté’s question once a week. Where this week did I feel a no inside me and say yes anyway? Acknowledge it. Not the occasional lapse — the pattern. Most people find the same name shows up over and over.

2. Say it out loud, and say it in person. We are terrible at guessing whether people will say yes. In one set of studies people underestimated by half how many strangers would agree to a direct request. Here is the catch: that holds face to face. Over text and email it runs the other way. Same words, different room, different odds.

3. Say the want, not the hint. “I need a few hours on Sunday” lands. “I am so tired” does not. A hint asks the other person to do the noticing, and the noticing is the part many of us are already doing alone.

4. If you cannot say it yet, write it. Back in 1986 James Pennebaker had students write for a few days about the hardest thing that ever happened to them. Bessel van der Kolk tells the story in The Body Keeps the Score. Those students went to the doctor less over the following months. Writing is not the same as being heard, but it is a door.

5. Treat it as a skill, not a character test. Swedish researchers gave 210 adults an eight-week course on how to ask plainly, say no, and disagree without blowing things up. It worked. And the people who did it alone, with no coach, did about as well as the ones with a therapist. Nobody was supposed to already know this.

Your inner self is dying to come out and play. Not the polished one. The real one, with the opinions and the wants and the strange sense of humor you have been keeping in a drawer. And I have found it is that true self that our friends, our partner, the world - like more than the fake overly polite version.

-Jared

P.S. - My wife Baddie Crocker has a beautiful newsletter where she shares her perspectives on tending the land, recipes, women’s health and more.

P.S. - This newsletter does not provide medical advice. The content, such as graphics, images, text, and all other materials, are provided for reference and educational purposes only. The content is not meant to be complete or exhaustive or to be applicable to any specific individual's medical condition.

Here are links to things that have helped me improve my health:

Whoop - Track your HRV and REM Sleep

Function Health - Optimize Your Health via 160+ BioMarkers

Here are a few topics I think you’ll love if you haven’t checked them out before:

How to Breathe for Better Health

How to Supercharge Your Sleep

The Power of the Sauna

Butler et al. (2003). The social consequences of expressive suppression. Emotion, 3(1), 48–67.

Gross & Levenson (1997). Hiding feelings. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 106(1), 95–103.

Jack, Brody & Sikov (2026). Advancing the Next Generation of Research on Self-Silencing and Depression. Sex Roles, 92(2), Art. 7.

Williams & Tiedens (2016). The subtle suspension of backlash. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 165–197.

Flynn & Lake (2008). If you need help, just ask. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(1), 128–143.

Hagberg et al. (2023). Efficacy of transdiagnostic CBT for assertiveness: an RCT. Internet Interventions, 32, 100629.