Emotional Labor: The Cost of Hiding Emotions

“Emotional labor is the silent weight we carry, managing feelings for the sake of others while often neglecting our own”

In our day-to-day routine, there are countless people whom we interact with at work, at home, or in public. We frequently have to control our feelings or emotions during these interactions. There are several times when you feel stressed or hurt but choose to smile sometimes in some situations because revealing your real emotions may feel uncomfortable. You may be unaware of the fact that hiding your feelings and showing that things are smooth is the phenomenon we recognize as emotional labor.

The sociologist, ‘Arlie Hochschild’ was the person who invented the term ’emotional labor’ in the early 1980s. He wanted to explain the ways some jobs put people in situations where they need to control their emotions to present a certain image. At the very first, this concept was used to define the emotional pressure on service workers. E. g. a flight attendant who has to stay pleasant and polite, even if the crew is going through a stressful experience.

Over the period, people understood that Emotional labor is something we all face, both in our personal lives and in the workplace. It’s hard to notice but emotional labor can have a major impact on mental and physical health too.

Let’s understand about the Emotional Labor

Emotional labor is not only managing but altering our emotional expressions to fit social expectations or service requirements. It’s not about hiding your feelings but presenting emotions to an extent that we do not know what we are feeling. This can switch your feelings in such a way, that you have to keep smiling when you’re feeling down inside.

In the workplace, emotional labor can be a part of customer-facing roles. Retail workers must keep themselves cheerful even after dealing with difficult customers with different behavioral patterns, and caregivers need to maintain calm at the workplace, even when they are under massive stress.

Not only at the workplace but in our personal lives we perform emotional labor too, whether it’s keeping a straight face like nothing has happened in a family discussion, in heated arguments, or showing you are the ‘strong’ one for friends when you’re feeling inadequate yourself. Hiding true feelings to meet societal or workplace expectations is emotional labor, which often leads to emotional exhaustion over time. At Self Pivot, our Online Therapy helps you navigate emotional labor, offering support to manage hidden stress and reclaim your emotional well-being.

The Actual Cost of Emotions Hiding:

Though it looks like a small thing, holding back or putting on a false image, over time, the constant effort of managing your emotions can make you overwhelmed, exhausted, and even numb. Such constant suppression can lead to long-term mental health concerns. Certain common experiences include: 

Emotional Exhaustion:

Repetitively hiding or faking emotions can be challenging. Over time, trying to keep up a pretense can drain your mental and emotional energy. It can make you feel worthless and empty as if you’ve given too much of yourself to the people without taking time to revive.

Detachment:

To protect themselves from emotional breakdowns, a few of them may start to keep themselves emotionally isolated from such circumstances or relationships overall. This can be a cause of detachment, where you feel that you don’t belong with others as well as yourself. 

Depression and Anxiety:

Studies have revealed that people who face a high level of emotional labor in their jobs can have a higher risk of developing mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety. Constantly having to hide negative emotions or pretend to be someone you’re not can cause a mismatch between how you feel inside and what you’re showing on the outside, leading to feelings of loneliness and sadness. It also creates pressure to not let your vulnerability reveal itself. This creates anxiety and fear as well.

Physical Health Issues:

When we suppress emotions, they show themselves through physical illnesses. Long-term stress can cause headaches, digestive issues like IBS, cardiac concerns, and autoimmune conditions. Continuous control of emotions can trigger the body’s stress response, causing long-term health damage over time.

Reason for Performing Emotional Labor?

Many people are unaware that they are performing emotional labor. Society has taught most of us to never create space for vulnerability. All your unpleasant emotions should be experienced behind closed doors. We not only see it as a sign of weakness to reveal what you truly feel but we also glorify- ‘ being strong’; ‘keeping it all together’; ‘tolerating/ suffering in silence’.

These societal messages are spread growing up, in educational settings as well as in the workplace. The work culture doesn’t leave room for psychological safety and empathy, on top of that demanding job roles and working hours doesn’t even leave a window for some to process their emotions. 

In job profiles when you are to face not only your supervisors but be in regular contact with clients, the burden falls from both ends, they are at the receiving end of frustrations and expectations. This creates a systemic issue.

In addition, cultural demands in terms of gender and relationship dynamics, play a role.

Cultural standards play an important role in determining how we show our emotions. Women are often expected to be composed and nurturing, while men may feel pressured to overpower vulnerability. 

This suppression is frequently carried out in the workplace, especially in industries like healthcare, hospitality, and customer service. Centers, where emotional labor is a work requirement. Employees are expected to maintain cheerful and welcoming behavior irrespective of their real feelings, and failure to fulfill everyone’s expectations can impact job performance or even lead to job loss.

In personal relations, emotional labor is intended to maintain harmony. Especially women, often manage fights, offer support, and keep family commitments as the priority, but this can make them emotionally exhausted over the period.

How to deal with Emotional Labor

Emotional labor has been a part of our lives, but we can manage it and protect our well-being differently. You can start it by recognizing this dissonance (every time you notice a dichotomy between what you are feeling and what you’re projecting.

Make choices that reduce this dissonance, this could look like having safe spaces to process feelings, drawing boundaries at work, researching workplace cultures, questioning age-old societal messages that we have learned growing up, prioritizing one’s needs, and creating space within the self. Support in the form of therapy can especially aid in identifying such dissonance and help you navigate such challenging emotional experiences.

Carefully curating circles of friends who are genuinely present for you, colleagues, or seniors that give you honest and healthy perspectives is also extremely crucial. “Maintaining openness while communicating is necessary.”. We must learn to trust ourselves that the only way we can build healthier relationships is through authenticity. In the end, recognizing and addressing emotional labor is key to protecting your well-being and fostering more authentic, balanced relationships.

Conclusion

Though emotional labor is a part of life nowadays it comes with its costs. Hiding it is not the solution as it can lead to exhaustion, mental health concerns, and physical ailments. We can lessen its impact by recognizing while doing it, setting limits, and following self-care. Although we can’t always succeed in avoiding emotional labor, we can choose to live more realistically by accepting our true feelings.