Real Toughness Isn’t Suppression

In a 1993 experiment, people asked to hide their reaction to a disgusting film managed to look calm, but they felt just as disgusted as everyone else, and several measures of sympathetic nervous system activity rose. Hiding a feeling and managing it turn out to be different processes. Research on emotion regulation points to three practical steps for hard moments.

The shield model of toughness.

A common picture of toughness is a person on whom nothing registers. Anxiety doesn’t show and doubt doesn’t slow them down. In this picture resilience works like a shield: grit your teeth and hide what you feel.

The nervous system does not follow that picture. When something goes badly, such as a hard conversation or a deadline you are about to miss, heart rate climbs and breathing changes. The shield model asks you to hide those reactions. Researchers have tested what happens when people do.

Hiding a feeling is different from handling it.

James Gross and Robert Levenson showed participants a film clip chosen to provoke disgust and asked some of them to behave so that an observer could not tell what they were feeling. Those participants showed less on their faces. They reported the same level of disgust as the others, and several measures of sympathetic nervous system activity went up (Gross & Levenson, 1993).

Composure is sometimes what a situation requires. You don’t need to show everything you feel in front of a patient or an interview panel. The useful distinction is that you can get better at concealing an emotion without getting any better at managing it.

Steve Magness makes this distinction central in his book Do Hard Things. He describes the old model of toughness as running on fear and suppression, and argues for a version in which a person can feel fear or doubt and still choose what to do next rather than acting on the urge to escape. That choice happens in the gap between what happens to you and what you do about it.

An ordinary example.

Suppose someone questions a decision you made, in a meeting or in clinic, with other people present. Your face gets warm. Before they finish the sentence you are building your defense, and you have mostly stopped listening.

Creating a gap can be as small as noticing I’m getting defensive and letting them finish. You can still disagree. You have given yourself time to hear what was actually said, and the chance to respond to it instead of reacting to it.

The research suggests three steps for building that gap.

1. Name the feeling.

When the reaction hits, put it into words, silently or aloud: I’m anxious. I’m frustrated. I’m afraid this will fail. Psychologists call this affect labeling.

One clear test comes from an exposure study conducted with people afraid of spiders. Participants were repeatedly exposed to a live spider, and one group was guided to describe their fear in words as they did. A week later, facing a different spider in a different room, the labeling group showed a smaller skin conductance response than the groups that used other strategies (Kircanski, Lieberman & Craske, 2012).

The labeling group did not report feeling less afraid. Their bodies responded differently while their self-reports stayed about the same. This is one study of one fear, but it suggests that how you feel and how you respond can move separately. Feeling calm does not have to come first. Naming what is happening is enough to start.

2. Check how you are reading the situation.

Stress depends partly on a comparison between what a situation demands and the resources you believe you have. When the demands look larger, the moment reads as a threat. When you believe you have enough to work with, the same moment can read as a challenge: still hard, but manageable.

Jeremy Jamieson and colleagues tested this with a stressful public-speaking task in front of evaluators. Beforehand, one group was told that the physical signs of stress, such as a pounding heart and fast breathing, are the body preparing to meet a demand. Compared with the control groups, that group showed a more efficient cardiovascular response, with the heart pumping more effectively and less resistance in the blood vessels, a pattern associated with challenge rather than threat (Jamieson, Nock & Mendes, 2012). The task was just as hard for everyone; the body’s response to it differed.

It was a single laboratory study, and it does not mean any problem can be reinterpreted away. It does suggest that the interpretation matters. When the reaction comes, look at the situation rather than the feeling:

• What do I know?
• What have I prepared?
• What can I control?
• Who can help?

If the honest answer is that you lack something you need, such as more time or more information, say so. Calling something a challenge does not close a real gap.

3. Choose the next move, and be willing to change it.

With the feeling named and the situation assessed, pick an action. If you are getting defensive, ask a question before you argue. If you are out of your depth, ask for help.

The shield model has one response to everything, which is to push harder. George Bonanno and Charles Burton argue that people cope best when they can read the context, draw on more than one strategy and notice when a strategy isn’t working (Bonanno & Burton, 2013). Sometimes the resilient choice is to keep going, and sometimes it is to change the plan. Committing to something difficult is compatible with deciding your current approach is wrong.

The one thing to do.

The next time a conversation turns difficult, notice the moment you stop listening and start preparing your defense. Name it to yourself, then ask one question about what the other person means before you answer.

Afterward you may still feel irritated. Review what you did rather than how you felt. Did you let them finish, and did you ask the question? Those two answers give you something specific to work on next time.

If what you are facing is a long project rather than a hard moment, the post on discipline and design covers how to start and how to keep going.

What this does not show.

Most of the evidence here comes from short laboratory tasks, and effects in the lab tend to be larger and cleaner than effects in daily life. These steps are for ordinary hard moments. They are not a treatment for an anxiety disorder, trauma or depression, and anyone dealing with those should talk with a clinician.

Suppression is not always wrong either. In some moments, such as delivering a difficult diagnosis to a family, keeping your expression steady is part of the job. The problem comes when it is the only tool you have.