44. What If Our Health Crisis Starts With Unfelt Emotions?

If you’ve ever told yourself “I’m fine” while your body keeps tightening, buzzing, or breaking down, you already understand the problem we’re naming today: emotional suppression. We’re stepping back from the noise of modern life to look at a pattern baked into American conditioning and why it may be a hidden driver behind the chronic illness epidemic. I've been diving into the research, and once you see it, it's hard to unsee. 

We connect the dots between childhood rules about emotions and adult health outcomes. When anger, grief, and even joy get shut down, the nervous system doesn’t magically reset because our thoughts say it should. We walk through the stress mechanism: sympathetic activation, cortisol and adrenaline, and what happens when the stress cycle never completes. From there, we explore the research links discussed around chronic stress, heart disease, hypertension, obesity, type 2 diabetes, autoimmune conditions, chronic pain and fibromyalgia, and the provocative findings tying suppressed anger and emotional non-expression to cancer progression. This is not about blaming individuals for getting sick; it’s about finally naming a factor that too often gets ignored in public health conversations. 

We also talk about why women can be uniquely impacted, how “feminine rage” builds when anger is punished or buried, and what it looks like to start rebuilding emotional literacy as a practical skill. If you’re tired of white-knuckling your way through triggers and stress, this offers a clearer map of what’s happening inside your body and why feeling your feelings can be real preventive healthcare. Subscribe for more, share this with someone who needs it, and leave a review telling us what emotion you’re ready to stop suppressing.

If this episode spoke to you, it would mean the world if you took a moment to leave a review or share it with a friend who needs it. And make sure you hit follow so you never miss an episode of Conditioning to Consciousness.

You can connect with me on Instagram @jesscallahan_, join my Substack community at conditioningtoconsciousness.substack.com, or explore more of my work at jesscallahan.com.

My Back in the Body Nervous System Healing course is now available! Find it here.

Thanks for listening — I’m so grateful you’re here.

Transcript

Accidentally Writing A Book

Emotional Suppression As Cultural Design

A Detour On Who Gets Called American

The US Health Crisis Context

How Suppressed Anger Becomes Stress

Disease Links From Heart To Cancer

Autoimmune Disease And Women’s Burden

Feminine Rage And What Comes Next

What You Can Control Starting Today

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hey guys. Welcome back to the Conditioning to Consciousness podcast. I feel like it's been a minute since we've done a solo episode here. And I don't know, I don't know about you guys, but life is just like crazy right now. Um, you know, the world is insane, and just I feel like managing energy from that by itself is enough. But soccer season's back, and uh I mean it it didn't actually ever go away. Um, but you know, we're back into like game mode and traveling and and then just like traveling for fun. Um, and school, you know, we had schools back in session, we uh just started a new semester. So yeah, life's just um it's just busy. When is it not busy? It's full at the moment. It's good full, um, for for the most part, right? But anyway, so here we are with another episode, a solo episode. And I guess I have updates for you guys. I can't remember if I told you that I accidentally started writing a book. So ever since I started this, like, I guess, healing or reinvention process, redirect of my life, one area that's been a huge focal point for me has been emotional suppression. And I'm just like constantly floored at how much we we don't focus on emotional processing, like healthy emotional processing. And, you know, I've known it in my own life. Like really, that's that is at the core of my fibromyalgia diagnosis, like emotional suppression and suppression in general. But um, you know, and I'll I'll get into like the mechanisms behind all of that. But as I started to look at my own life and look at just the ways that like emotional suppression was showing up, and I started to think about like generations of conditioning that lead to something like that. I started to just take like a wider look at it and and understand like how much it's impacting so many of us, like so many like pockets of American culture, especially. I'm sure it's, you know, most of Western culture and also, you know, it's probably prevalent in in many cultures around the globe, but just for the purposes of, you know, this conversation and and for where we're going next, I'll I'll talk through the lens of like American culture, right? But um, there's just so many pockets of like things that feel broken in our country. And I started tracing the roots back, and so many of them are related to emotional suppression. And like it's the more I like dug into it, the more I really understood that it is by design. Like the more we're disconnected from our emotions, it actually like changes our brain chemistry, it changes uh our biology, it it changes us, it reduces our capacity, it reduces our ability to like hold nuance, um, it impacts our ability to like develop really strong relationships with you know each other. It impacts our like inner guidance system, intuition, like our inner knowing. It disconnects us from that. Like there's just the ripple effect is so tremendous. But really, like what I started finding is just that like it is at the core of what feels so wrong in our country right now. And so I started writing an article. It was just, it was meant to just really be about emotional suppression, and I was linking it to like the numbing of America. And you know, I I started writing it at this point that like I had just cleared my schedule. I had like pre-recorded podcast episodes, and um, I was at like a breaking, like a break in school where I could really like focus, and I had planned on on diving into a different project, but I just started writing and I wrote for three days straight, and I was like, this is a really long Substack article. And the more I started just like building out the outline and and really like understanding like the tentacles that this article had and all the different directions that it could go, I was like, um, okay, I guess like this, this is how I'm writing my book. This is how I'm writing my first book, right? I've known that I've wanted to like create a body of work around this, but um, you know, it wasn't like intentional in how it started. But anyway, so basically, like the book is really centering on the numbing of America and it's talking through the history of you know how this like numbing is is by design, how how we got to this place where these like systems um sort of just like self-replicate and keep us disconnected from ourselves. Like you think about the emotional conditioning that you experience as a young child, and you know, when you're told like not to have temper tantrums, you're told um, you know, like big boys don't cry, or um, you know, girls aren't supposed to be angry, and girls are told to perform for the male gaze. Like all of that is really um intricately linked. And so it this the book sort of goes through that journey. So anyway, as I've been, as I've been diving into it, A, that's why I've been like MIA a little bit. Um, I just you know, I haven't been doing as many solo episodes because I'm really enjoying writing the book, researching the book, holding interviews with people, just like about their experiences with emotional suppression, doing like deep dives into the history, and then it's like a cultural analysis. So, like, what's the downstream impact? And that is where the conversation leads me to today. Um, I've decided, like, in the process of writing the book, I'm starting to just like share some of the like the research that I'm finding that is just like to me, it's mind-blowing. And maybe you'll find it to be mind-blowing too. Maybe not, maybe you know some of this stuff, but to see it all in one place, like it's shocking, but also it's like, why aren't we talking about these things more? I know sometimes it can feel a little bit abstract, but like at the end of the day, like the message is we've never been taught to fully process our emotions. When we don't process our emotions, it's causing really like bad shit to happen in our lives. And so we have to learn how to process our emotions. Like, it's as easy as that, but emotional processing is something that is so like foreign for so many people. I can't tell you how many times, you know, I've had conversations about like anger or frustration with like grown-ass adults, like like myself. It's the only reason that I know how to have these conversations is because I've been researching it in so much like depth. But, you know, grown adults saying to me, okay, so like when I get triggered in the kitchen because I'm doing too many things at once and the kids are like bugging me, what do I do? How do I process that? Like, what am I feeling in that moment? Frustration, anger, like, and that's not by any means like a knock on these individuals or me. I mean, that was me a you know a few years ago. It's still me sometimes because you know, it's something that we have to constantly, I think, like reteach ourselves. Like, can we have to constantly be like reminding ourselves of and like relearning, but I think it's really just so indicative of how how we were raised, the culture we're living in, and the like total devaluation of just like the impact of emotions in our lives. And so today I want to talk specifically about like health and the impact of chronic emotional suppression on our health. And I think like one other caveat that I want to just touch on, I'm not gonna go into deeply, but I know it'll come up later and I'll I'll go into it in more detail. But like, okay, there are subcultures within America that process emotion totally differently. And the like the health impacts are at this point, like these health impacts are just done across, like, you know, as like a subset of America, of American culture. But as I've been diving into it, there is definitely a difference in like white Americans and then other subcultures within America. Um within the United States, actually. And like this is not the trajectory of where I'm going with this conversation, but like I had no clue. This is how like egocentric, ethnocentric, like you know, I'm still like unpacking my own conditioning every day. Every day I'm, you know, trying to work on this stuff, but like um the discovery, like after the Bad Bunny Super Bowl halftime show, um, having a lot of conversations with different people from like Central and South America, and one of the conversations, several of the conversations actually centered on the fact that like like in a lot of places in South America, the um like they're they're taught, and and I think Europe too, correct me if you if I'm wrong, if you're listening from either of those places, but definitely anecdotally, South America. A lot of people are taught that there are six continents, okay? In the United States, we're taught that there are seven continents, and North and South America being two separate continents. But in South America, I have heard from multiple Native South Americans that have said that no, like we're taught that it is America. Like we're just, you know, it's just like, as you might say, Northern and Southern Europe, you would say northern and southern, like North and South America. I was like, I literally can't believe that I've gone over 40 years of my life and like didn't fully understand that. And like, why do we call if if the whole continent or continents, depending on your, you know, frame of reference, like, is America, why are we Americans? Like, anyway, okay, so so as I'm talking about, I have to figure out how I'm framing that in the book because like just like calling us Americans, like US Americans, I don't know. Um, but either way, like, okay, so uh total, I digress, I digress, but like when I say American, if I keep saying it in this conversation, just know that that is a point that I'm like actively trying to like work at. Like what's okay, anyway, so okay Americans. There there is man, a health crisis. I don't even know if like that's the yeah, we're just gonna call it a health crisis. Like, our country is sick in so many ways, like, but like we our health is failing, and there are so many things that like that contribute to it. So like, even though I'm gonna tie this to emotional suppression, there's so many, there are so many different elements that factor in here. So like um, like like on a systemic basis, like there are systems in place that for centuries have been oppressing different groups of people and giving different groups of people access to, you know, different resources. And once when those things compound, that has an impact on health, right? Like food deserts and um like the downstream impact of like redlining, and like we're gonna get into all of that in the book and in other places hopefully in future episodes. But um, there is like a system-wide impact that has contributed to massive differences in our health. Like Native Americans have some of the like poorest health outcomes, and a lot of that you can trace to how Native Americans have been like treated and supported and putting in quotes by our country. Um, but there's also like our healthcare system is not good, right? Um, it gives access to some and not everyone, and like especially in preventative ways. And so there's a lot of different impacts, uh toxins, environmental toxins, toxins in our foods, plastics, all of that. So I'm not suggesting by any means that like there is any, like that this is the only contributing factor. I think the biggest thing in my mind is like why, if we know that it is, if we know that emotional suppression is linked to so many illnesses and diseases, like, why aren't we talking about it more? Um, here's here's an example. Okay, so so according to the National Institute for Healthcare Management, um, approximately six in ten Americans live with at least one chronic disease. Six in ten Americans living with chronic disease. Like that by itself is just like insane. Okay, but so they have an infographic that um I'll link to. But basically, like they outline several lifestyle factors and social determinants that impact the risk for these chronic conditions. And okay, so their list is it's things like education level, economic stability, cigarette smoking, excessive alcohol use, healthcare access and quality, neighborhood in the built environment, poor nutrition, physical inactivity. So, like, yes to all of those things, yes, for sure. But like, why aren't we talking about emotional suppression? And again, I know it's sort of abstract, but like let's make it less abstract by talking about it more. I don't know. Um, I just like I think like the more that I started to really dive into this, the more I I like got like I'm just like angry. Um I'm like mad that we have lived our lives like this, that so many people are sick because of it. Um, that yeah, so just so many, so so many of our lives have been impacted, and it's not like again, we're talking about health today, but like the trickle-down effect is massive. Um there, you know, like if you talk about like like climate change, how we're like decimating the environment, you could talk about um the mental health crisis, you could talk about the male loneliness epidemic, which I know we'll talk about more later. Um yeah, all of those things. But anyway, um we're talking today about the health impacts. So, okay, I want to give you a little bit of an overview of like how, like what the primary mechanisms are in how emotional suppression leads to poor health outcomes. And then I just want to like cite some of the research. This isn't gonna be a super long episode today, but um okay, so a lot of it is is linked to like um stress, like chronic stress in your body, uh, hormone disruption, um inflammation. So basically, okay, think about this when you feel angry about something, when was the last time you felt angry? What did you do about your anger? Did you feel the anger? Did you tell yourself that you don't have time to process the anger? Did you tell yourself that you shouldn't be angry about this? Did you tell yourself I'll deal with it later? There's a lot of different like things that we do to basically like stop ourselves from feeling angry. And of course, like it's inconvenient in like the moment to have to deal with anger. And sometimes we need a minute to like process and to um like cool ourselves off and to kind of get at the core so we're not reactive, especially if like we're new to emotional processing and everything, then reactivity might be a little like heightened. Okay, so what happens in those moments? Like when you um when you experience something that makes you angry, you're having the same physiological response as like if you see a bear, right? You are um your body detects a threat and it responds as if there is a threat. Your body cannot tell the difference between anger as a threat versus like a bear as a threat. It's activating the sympathetic state of your nervous system, and your body is being flooded then with like cortisol and adrenaline stress hormones. So when the bear, when the threat when the bear goes away, right, you've run from the bear, or maybe not, but you've hidden from the bear, the bear gets distracted, the bear goes away, you're safe again. And so, you know, somewhere in your mind, you're like, okay, I'm safe. And and you release, you stop the cycle of stress, you go back into rest and digest, right? The the threat has passed, you can exhale, breathe that sigh of relief, relief uh yeah, relief, and then and move on, right? So when you're angry and you tell yourself cognitively, like, I shouldn't be angry about this, your body is still having that same physiological response. Your body is still producing the stress hormones, it's still producing cortisol, it's still producing adrenaline, they are continuing to course through your body. And just because cognitively you've said, I am no longer gonna feel this anger, like I'm just not gonna feel it, um, you're not interrupting the stress cycle. And so the stress, it's basically the cortisol stays in your body. You stay in a state of like low grade activation. And so it's really like it's that moment, it's that process that keeps you in a state of low grade activation. It keeps cortisol continuously running through your body. And in so many of these instances, it's it's the stress, it's the low grade activation that's at like the heart of why we're getting sick at the level that we're getting sick. So, um, okay, so I want to talk a little bit then about the various um, you know, some of the leading like chronic illnesses and how they're linked, like, like what um, just some of the research behind it, right? So heart disease is the leading cause of death in men and women today. Um, a publication, circulation cardiovascular imaging found that chronic stress is as damaging to the heart as smoking, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure. Now, chronic stress can be, you can you can basically like experience chronic stress from different, like from so many different things. It doesn't just have to be emotional suppression. Um, you know, basically like depending on like the situation that you're living in. And and a lot of these, like the risk factors that we talked about earlier can contribute to chronic stress in many ways. But a lot of times there is an emotion that is associated with the stress. So, like you're caregiving, you're exhausted, yes, you're stressed in that way. But are you also hanging on to like bitterness about the caregiving, frustration about the systems that don't support you, um, anger. There's all of there's so many different ways that you can interrupt the stress cycle emotionally, because a lot of times it is like it's tied to like a deeper pattern that we're not unraveling the stresses. So, so basically, like research shows that when you have a nurse nervous system that's stuck in threat mode, it actually like physically remodels the blood vessels over time. So um, like even as early as 1939, there's a a researcher named Franz Alexander, and Franz proposed that repression of anger is associated with chronic elevation and blood pressure and ultimately with hypertension. So, like this is stuff that people have been focused on for, I mean, that's like coming up on 100 years, like 80, 85, 80, 84, 86, something, 80-something years. Um, if you know me, you know that I have an aversion to doing math on the fly. Um, okay, anyway, so obesity, um, obesity is directly linked to emotional suppression in in actually like many different ways. So chronic emotional suppression keeps cortisol elevated, and cortisol directly signals to the body to store fat, particularly like visceral fat around the abdomen. So um, when we carry extra belly weight, you that can't. Can be directly linked to cortisol and not releasing the stress that's like coursing it through our bodies. Um, we also might see it through the lens of like emotional eating as a suppression strategy, or like this one's indirect, but also really important. So when you're suppressing emotion, you are disconnecting from inner authority. You're not listening to your body. You're basically telling, you're telling your body that like your okay, so your body sends you a signal and says, I'm sad, I'm angry, I'm frustrated, and you're like, I don't want to feel that, I'm gonna stuff that aside. And so when you do that chronically, your body learns that like you're not going to pay attention to the signals that it's sending you. And so it just stops sending the signals altogether. And so this can actually really impact the um like hunger cues, for example. Like uh maybe you're just literally always hungry or never hungry. Um, the signals, like the the basically like the signal system, the communication system between your body and your mind is becomes broken over time when you perpetually ignore the signals that your body is is sending you. Um, okay, there's there are links like between type 2 diabetes and emotional suppression. The links here are mostly like hormonal and behavioral. So cortisol raises blood sugar directly. Um, so under chronic suppression and stress, cortisol keeps blood sugar chronically elevated. The pancreas keeps producing insulin to management, and then over time, cells become resistant to the insulin. Um again, here, like so when when you're disconnected from your body and suppressing the emotions, you're also like less likely to notice some of the early symptoms that might arise. And in and in turn, you're less likely to seek the care that you need. Um, okay, here's one that I've I feel like is just like mind-blowing to me. Um, cancer. So research consistently links the suppression of anger with like how cancer spreads. Okay. So um there's a study here that basically says that like there's there was a research study that showed consistently and extremely low anger scores in cancer patients. So low that they suggest suppression, repression, or restraint of anger. Um so basically, like they they've deduced then that they're that like suppressed anger can be a precursor to the development of cancer and also a factor in how the cancer progresses. Um, one psychologist, her name was Lydia Temishok. I'm not totally sure if that's how you say her name, but she in her study she found that patients who are less emotionally expressive had thicker tumors and more rapidly dividing cancer cells. So so like the cancer was worse. Like when they're suppressing their anger, the tumors become like thicker and they and they spread more rapidly. This one, so Gabor Mate, I love his work. I think that he's um just I, you know, I I follow his work really closely. I think he has done tremendous work in this space. I wish more people were talking about the work that he does, but basically, like in in his work, he has documented that in several large studies spanning multiple countries, psychologists interviewing thousands of patients could predict with overwhelming certainty who would and who would not develop cancer based simply on the degree to which they suppressed their anger. They could predict who was going to develop cancer based on how much they suppressed their anger. What? Like what? Okay, that like it's just it's just mind-blowing to me. Um you know, some of the other stuff, like obviously chronic pain, fibromyalgia, like fibromyalgia we now know is a nervous system disorder essentially. Like for me, the way I experience it is that like my nervous system is is I'm I am regulating it and I am living like many days pain-free this time of year can be more difficult. And I think I, you know, it's it's um a lot of like guessing and and just like trial and error, but you know, I think that having some really beautiful days, then followed up by like really gross and depressing days, like serotonin spikes, um and and also like cold on my body still. Like, I don't know. I just like it's it's hard of my body. So, and after like long winters, it's um I don't know. It's it's such a it's it's like um such a personal thing for people and it really like lives in a very fine balance of like, you know, there are times that I'm like, oh, I feel a flare-up coming on, what am I not processing? But then there's also just like physical stimuli in the environment. But my nervous system reacts in really unpredictable ways because I lived decades in a state of like dysregulation. Um, autoimmune disease, though. Okay, so this one's really, really interesting. So when the nervous system remains in a state of chronic low-grade activation, with those stress hormones circulating, inflammation builds. So the immune system, with the inflammation in your body and the stress constantly coursing through your body, the immune system eventually turns on the body, which is autoimmune disease. It is the body attacking various parts. Like your, you know, each autoimmune disease is a um, it's the body attacking a different part of the body, right? So celiacs is um is digestive. Um that's, you know, one of the ones that I have. Lupus is something different. And Hashimoto's is different, and they're they're all each of them just have like a different part of the body that it attacks, but probably surprising no one. Um, like the 80, okay, nearly 80% of the 50 million Americans living with autoimmune conditions are women. And, you know, it is women who were not just like suppressing our anger and our emotions. We're not the only ones, like men also have to suppress their emotions based on these like societal standards. It is more acceptable for a man to express anger than a woman to express anger. But also, like women today just like think about like the the the um the playing field that we're working in. Yeah, like we have fought really hard to have more equal rights, but we're still fighting these battles every day. There are still epigenetic imprints that we don't fully understand the like implications of, where you know, we're carrying the trauma of our grandmothers who were totally silenced and you know were um silenced in some ways, like really, really violently. Um, we carry those imprints in the expression of our DNA. So, anyway, the amount that women carry, the emotional labor that we often carry in a household, and it's just like the amount that we suppress is tremendous. And so it probably doesn't surprise anyone that most nearly 80% of people with autoimmune conditions are women. Um, okay, but so anyway, like cognitive decline, there's emerging research linking it to Alzheimer's, chronic pain, as we've talked about, um, IBS and digestive issues, like the list literally just goes on and on and on. And so, yeah, I feel like that's where I want to leave you today. Um, I we're gonna talk more about emotional processing and healthy ways to express your emotions. I think like feminine rage is something that I really feel called to focus on right now because there are so many women who are like, I don't feel rage. I don't feel anger, even just like the word rage is is like triggering. Um, but like feminine rage happens when you suppress your anger for so long that it just builds and builds and builds and builds. And like whether the rage like comes out naturally, it's like a pressure valve. Like you like release a little bit of it. You can do it that way too. Like whether you intentionally release it, like if you're a woman and you are not feeling anger regularly, and processing that anger, releasing it from your body and erupting that stress cycle, then you're most likely carrying feminine rage. And so, yeah, there's just there's a lot that we have to do to release it. And like grief, sadness, like we have been taught to grief in like taught to grieve, I'm sorry, in all of the wrong ways. Even like, okay, feeling joy, like being just completely elated is something that we suppress too because it feels like prideful, boastful, it feels um over the top, indulgent even. So okay, that's all of that, you know, we'll we will go to all of those places. But for now, I want to leave you just with this as it was today. Um, just you know, the the research behind how how we got here and one one, you know, possible, not even possible, one of the causes for all of the chronic stuff that we are experiencing right now. Um, we're not gonna be able to fix all of the systems right away. We're not going to be able to, um, it's not gonna be easy to fight the like cloned meat that's in the in our grocery stores now and like the the like chemicals that were just approved as organic to like spray on our vegetables and the microplastics that are like literally in everything and like the lead that apparently is in she and shoes, um, like those things are hard to fight. I mean, we're all fighting the good fight, and like we have to do it together, but emotional suppression is something that we can control, we can um we can participate in that healing journey more easily. It's like it's just a matter of tuning in and saying, like, I'm gonna sit with this emotion with curiosity. What's it trying to tell me? How can I work it through my body, even if I have to come back to it over and over again and keep working with it, like you'll feel better, calmer, less reactive, all of those things once you just start to like tune in. So, okay, anyway, guys, I will leave you at that, and until next time, see you later.