Wemby and the Weight of Holding It All In
Earlier today, San Antonio Spurs center Victor Wembanyama sat down for an interview with journalist Maxime Aubin and said something that cut through the noise in a way that sports quotes rarely do.
Speaking about his own mental health, Wembanyama said, as a response to people calling him “soft” for caring about his feelings: “I refuse to carry the burden of having to hide my emotions.”
For a 21-year-old athlete operating under one of the most intense spotlights in professional sports, that’s a striking statement. It’s also, as it turns out, one of the most psychologically sound positions a person can take.
The pressure to hide emotions is not unique to professional athletes. It is one of the most pervasive and quietly damaging expectations in modern life — embedded in workplaces, families, relationships, and the internal narratives most people carry about what it means to be functional, professional, or strong. The cost of meeting that expectation, day after day, is significant in ways that psychology has been documenting for decades.
Emotional Suppression and its Effects on Mental Health
Emotional suppression is the deliberate inhibition of emotional expression. It’s different from emotional regulation, which involves managing how emotions are experienced and expressed in constructive ways. Suppression is something more blunt: the active effort to prevent an emotion from being visible, and often from being fully felt.
Most people engage in some degree of emotional suppression regularly:
- The tears held back in a meeting.
- The anger swallowed before it reaches the surface.
- The grief set aside because there isn’t time for it right now.
In small doses and appropriate contexts, this is a normal part of navigating social life. The problem is that for many people, suppression isn’t a tool used selectively — it’s a chronic operating mode that runs in the background of everything.
The difference matters enormously. Momentary suppression in a specific context has different effects than sustained, habitual suppression across all areas of life, and the research on what habitual suppression does to a person is consistent and problematic.
What Happens in the Body
Emotions are not purely psychological events. They are physiological ones. When an emotion arises, it triggers a cascade of activity in the nervous system — changes in heart rate, cortisol levels, muscle tension, breathing pattern, and neurological activation. The body is preparing to respond to whatever the emotion is signaling.
When that emotion is suppressed rather than expressed or processed, the physiological response doesn’t simply disappear. It continues. The activation persists even when the outward expression is shut down. Several decades of research have demonstrated that suppressing emotional expression actually increases physiological arousal rather than reducing it — the opposite of what most people intuitively expect.
James Gross at Stanford, one of the leading researchers on emotion regulation, has documented this pattern extensively. In studies where participants were asked to suppress their emotional reactions while watching distressing or emotionally evocative material, physiological measures showed sustained or elevated activation compared to participants who were allowed to express naturally. The suppression worked at the behavioral level — people looked calm — but the body told a different story.
Over time, that sustained physiological activation takes a toll. Chronic emotional suppression has been associated with elevated blood pressure, dysregulated cortisol patterns, weakened immune function, and increased cardiovascular risk.
The body was not designed to maintain an ongoing gap between what is experienced internally and what is expressed externally. Sustaining that gap requires effort, and that effort has a biological cost.
What Happens in the Mind
The psychological costs of chronic suppression are equally well-documented and perhaps more immediately recognizable in daily life.
One of the most consistent findings in the research is that suppression doesn’t reduce the intensity of an emotion — it amplifies it. The act of trying not to feel something, or not to show it, tends to make the emotion more intrusive rather than less. This is sometimes called the rebound effect, and it mirrors what most people have experienced: the harder you try not to think about something, the more it occupies your attention.
Suppression also consumes cognitive resources. When a significant portion of mental bandwidth is dedicated to monitoring and inhibiting emotional expression, less is available for other cognitive tasks — memory, attention, decision-making, social engagement. Studies have found that people who are actively suppressing an emotion perform worse on memory tasks and have more difficulty processing information during conversations. The effort of hiding is quietly taking up space that would otherwise be available for thinking.
There is also a relational dimension that is often underappreciated. Emotional suppression doesn’t just affect the person doing it — it affects the people around them. Research on social interactions consistently finds that suppression in one person creates discomfort and disconnection in their conversation partner, even when the partner can’t articulate why. People are more attuned to incongruence between expressed and experienced emotion than they consciously realize.
Relationships built around significant emotional suppression tend to feel superficial or unsatisfying to both parties, even when neither person fully understands what’s missing.
The Culture of Suppression
Emotional suppression doesn’t develop in a vacuum. It is learned, rewarded, and reinforced by specific cultural and social environments. Several forces consistently produce habitual suppressors.
The most well-documented is gender socialization. Men in most Western cultures are socialized from childhood to suppress a broad range of emotions, particularly those associated with vulnerability — sadness, fear, uncertainty, hurt. The messages are pervasive and start early: don’t cry, toughen up, hold it together. What gets rewarded is stoicism. What gets punished is emotional visibility. The result is a significant proportion of adult men who have spent decades developing highly efficient suppression mechanisms and have little practice with the alternative.
Women face a different but equally constraining version. The emotions deemed acceptable for women to express are often narrow — warmth, enthusiasm, gratitude — while anger, frustration, ambition, and certain forms of distress are met with social penalties. The policing looks different, but the outcome is similar: a learned orientation toward hiding specific emotional states.
Workplace culture adds another layer. Most professional environments implicitly or explicitly reward emotional suppression. Composure under pressure is admired. Emotional reactivity is stigmatized. Over years of professional life, the suppression habits developed at work can generalize to all other contexts, producing people who are no longer sure how to turn them off when they leave the office — or whether they want to.
High achievers are particularly vulnerable to this pattern. The same drive, discipline, and performance orientation that produces professional success can also produce a rigid relationship with emotional experience — emotions become things to be managed, controlled, optimized, or set aside in service of performance. The idea that an emotion might simply need to be felt, rather than used or processed into something productive, can feel almost foreign.
What Suppression Is Often Confused With
One of the reasons emotional suppression persists so reliably is that it gets confused with qualities that are genuinely valuable — self-control, professionalism, resilience, strength. These conflations are worth examining carefully because they shape how people think about their own emotional lives.
- Self-control is the ability to choose how to respond to an impulse or emotion. It is a skill, and a valuable one. Suppression is the blanket inhibition of emotional experience or expression regardless of context. They are not the same thing. A person with genuine self-control can feel an emotion fully and choose how and when to express it. A habitual suppressor cannot access that choice because the emotion is blocked before it fully registers.
- Resilience is the capacity to recover from adversity. Research on resilience consistently finds that emotional processing — the ability to experience, acknowledge, and work through difficult feelings — is central to it. Suppression and resilience are essentially opposites. The people who recover most effectively from difficulty are not the ones who feel the least. They are the ones who can tolerate what they feel and move through it.
- Professionalism is context-specific appropriateness. Choosing not to express every emotion in every setting is a normal part of social functioning. It becomes problematic when the professional setting bleeds into all other contexts, leaving no space where genuine emotional experience is permitted.
The distinction Wembanyama was drawing is essentially this last one. He wasn’t refusing to exercise judgment about when and how to express emotion. He was refusing to carry the ongoing burden of hiding — the chronic, effortful maintenance of a gap between inner experience and outer expression. That is a psychologically meaningful distinction, even if it rarely gets named as clearly as he named it.
What Emotional Expression Requires
If suppression is the problem, expression is not simply the solution — at least not in the form of unregulated emotional discharge. The research makes clear that venting, ruminating, or amplifying emotional experience without any processing element doesn’t produce relief. What produces relief is something more specific: the ability to acknowledge an emotion, experience it without being overwhelmed by it, and move through it in a way that allows for integration rather than just discharge.
This is a skill set, and it is one that many people were never taught. Families that modeled suppression don’t produce adults who know how to do this naturally. Neither do schools, workplaces, or the broader cultural environments described above. For a significant number of people, learning to relate differently to their own emotional experience — to stop hiding and start processing — is something that requires deliberate effort and often support.
Therapy provides exactly that kind of support. Several modalities have particularly strong evidence for helping people work with emotional experience in healthier ways:
- Somatic therapy works directly with the body’s experience of emotion, helping people develop awareness of and tolerance for the physiological dimension of emotional states that suppression keeps out of reach.
- EMDR addresses the stored emotional material from past experiences that often drives chronic suppression in the present.
- DBT builds the specific skills of emotional awareness, tolerance, and regulation that habitual suppressors typically haven’t developed.
- ACT works to change the relationship to emotional experience itself — shifting from avoidance and control to acceptance and flexibility.
What all of these approaches share is a recognition that the goal is not to feel less. It is to develop a more workable relationship with what is already being felt — one that doesn’t require the chronic expenditure of energy that suppression demands.
The Burden Wembanyama Was Describing
The word he used was burden. Not habit, not strategy, not tendency. Burden — something carried, something that requires effort to sustain, something with weight.
That framing is accurate. Emotional suppression is effortful. It consumes resources. It has costs that accumulate over time in the body, in relationships, in the quality of a person’s inner life. The people who carry it longest often don’t recognize how heavy it’s become until something disrupts the pattern — a loss, a health crisis, a relationship that finally creates enough safety to put it down — and they feel, sometimes for the first time in years, what it’s like to not be carrying it.
The burden can be set down. That process isn’t always simple, and for many people it doesn’t happen without support. But it is possible, and the research on what happens when people do it — the improvements in physical health, the deepening of relationships, the increase in psychological flexibility and resilience — suggests that it’s one of the more consequential changes a person can make.
If you recognize yourself in what’s described here — if chronic suppression is something you’ve been carrying for a long time without naming it — Flourish Psychology offers therapy in Brooklyn and throughout New York City for anxiety, depression, trauma, and the kind of deeper work that addresses what’s underneath the surface. Call 917-737-9475 or reach out through the contact page to get started.