Nikhil Kumar retweetledi
Emotional suppression costs you about 30% of your working memory. Measured on fMRI.
The anterior cingulate cortex processes emotional pain and cognitive control through overlapping circuits. When you shove emotions down instead of processing them, your prefrontal cortex burns glucose on inhibition. That’s glucose not available for decision-making, planning, or execution. The brain doesn’t have separate budgets for “feelings” and “performance.” It’s one pool.
The military figured this out the hard way. After decades of “push through it” culture, SOCOM funded research into emotional regulation for tier-one operators. The finding: operators who named and processed emotions before missions had faster reaction times and better decision-making under fire than operators who suppressed. The Special Forces pipeline now includes psychological flexibility training.
The historical record confirms it. Stoicism, the philosophy most often cited to justify “stop talking about feelings,” literally requires examining your emotions in writing every single day. Marcus Aurelius wrote the Meditations as a private journal. Epictetus taught students to dissect their emotional responses in granular detail. The entire Stoic method is structured emotional processing, not emotional avoidance.
What actually kills performance is rumination, looping on the same thought without resolution. The fix for rumination is more processing, not less. Cognitive behavioral therapy, the most evidence-backed intervention, works by teaching people to articulate and examine feelings with precision.
The highest performers process fast and move. They don’t skip the processing step.
Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸@pmarca
It is 100% true that great men and women of the past were not sitting around moaning about their feelings. I regret nothing.
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