Suppressed anger: when you are “always calm” and always tired

“I don’t get angry. Really, it’s just not in my nature. I’m only tired. Have been for about a year.”

Picture the evening that goes with that sentence. An arrangement that has been forgotten again. “It’s fine, no problem,” you say, and you almost mean it. Then you tidy the kitchen a little more loudly than usual, answer in single words, go to bed early and wake in the morning with a stiff neck and the feeling of not having slept at all. Nobody had to say anything. Nobody argued. And yet something cost a great deal of energy.

This post is about what happens to anger you don’t show — not even to yourself. Suppressed anger does not disappear; it finds other routes: into the body, into small digs and forgotten promises, or inwards, into self-criticism and low mood. I would like to show how to recognise those routes, and what the safer option is than the two most people know: staying silent or exploding.

Calm or silenced: not the same thing

There are people who are calm by nature. Things really don’t unsettle them easily, and when something does bother them they say so without much charge. And there are people who are calm because they once learned that anger was not welcome. From the outside they look alike. The difference lies in what goes on beneath the surface.

For the first, calm is a state. For the second, calm is work. Something rises in them — heat in the chest, a knot in the stomach, the thought “that’s not fair” — and almost in the same instant something else presses it down. Sometimes consciously: “I’m not going to make a scene now.” More often so quickly and so automatically that the anger is never noticed at all. Only the consequence is noticed: tiredness, an irritability with no address, the wish that everyone would just leave you alone.

Psychology separates these two processes. Conscious holding back is called suppression; unconscious pushing away is repression in the narrower, psychoanalytic sense. In everyday life the two are intertwined, so here I use one word for both. What matters is something else: in neither case is the emotion dealt with.

What suppression does: the face settles, the body doesn’t

We have fairly good laboratory data on this. In the 1990s the psychologists James Gross and Robert Levenson showed participants film scenes that provoke strong unpleasant emotions and instructed some of them not to let their feelings show. They managed it — less was visible on their faces. But they felt no less than those who were not holding back, and some measures of bodily arousal were actually higher in them. Suppression, then, hides the expression but not the experience, and the body pays for it.

Later studies by the same group added two details that seem very telling for everyday life. Jane Richards and Gross showed that people who hold back their emotional expression while something is happening remember less of what was said — suppression takes up part of your attention. And Emily Butler and colleagues found that in a conversation with someone who is hiding their feelings, the tension passes to the other person too: blood pressure rose in the one sitting opposite. Suppressed anger is not a private matter. Others feel it; they just don’t know what they are feeling.

And in the long run? In 2013 Benjamin Chapman and colleagues published a study that followed American adults for 12 years and found that those who reported more emotional suppression had a higher risk of dying during that period. I cite this cautiously: it is a single study showing an association, not a cause, and the authors themselves point to its limitations. But it is enough for me to stop taking the claim “it doesn’t hurt anyone if I keep quiet” for granted.

Where anger goes when you don’t show it

If an emotion does not disappear, it has to be redirected somewhere. Broadly, I see three directions in the literature, and they are not mutually exclusive — most people know all three, and one better than the others.

Below I go through all three in turn, because each has its own signs and its own traps.

The body: why you’re tired although you “do nothing”

Anger is a mobilising emotion. It prepares the body for action: the heart speeds up, the muscles tighten, the breath becomes shallower. If no action follows — if you say nothing, set no boundary, don’t leave — the readiness remains, only with nowhere to go. Muscles that tensed in order to do something are now holding in order to do nothing.

That is why suppressed anger rarely shows up in the body as “anger”. It shows up as a clenched jaw and teeth-grinding, stiff shoulders, a headache towards evening, a lump in the throat, a stomach that speaks up around certain people. And as a particular kind of tiredness: not the kind that follows finished work and is mended by sleep, but the tiredness of constant holding, which is still there in the morning. Richards and Gross’s study explains it well — holding back is not rest, it is an effort running in the background all day.

Here I have to be honest about the limits of what is known. Research on the link between held-in anger and illness, such as raised blood pressure, is inconsistent, and you cannot infer an emotion from a single symptom. A stiff neck may simply be a bad chair. Tiredness has many physical causes that a doctor should look at first; I write about this in Chronic fatigue: when there is no diagnosis, but the symptoms are real and “The tests are normal, but it still hurts”: what therapy knows about psychosomatics. More on how emotions and the body intertwine is in the knowledge base under psychosomatics.

Passive aggression: anger that takes the long way round

The second route is the most expensive for relationships. Anger that is not allowed through the door comes in through the window: as a forgotten promise, as lateness, as a chore done just badly enough that you won’t be trusted with it again, as a joke with a sharp edge, as a silence that lasts a day too long. We call this passive aggression. It is not a diagnosis but a description of behaviour, and it matters that the person is usually not lying. When they say “nothing’s wrong”, they often truly don’t know that something is.

A conversation might sound like this (a composed example, not a real person):

“Is something wrong?”
“No. Why?”
“Because you haven’t spoken to me since last night.”
“I am speaking. I’m just tired.”
“Are you angry that I forgot the dinner with your parents?”
“I’m not angry. It’s fine. I know you have more important things.”

The last sentence says everything the earlier ones deny. The anger is here — only without a name, so it cannot be talked about. The other person is left with an uncomfortable task: they feel an attack but cannot answer it, because officially it never happened. If they ask again, they are “overreacting”. If they let it go, they drift away. This is just what Butler finds in the laboratory: beside a person who hides their feelings, the other is more tense and feels less connected.

For the one hiding the anger, this route has its own logic. It lets the anger be expressed somehow after all, without risking an open conflict in which they would be “the one who shouts”. The price is that they never get what the anger wanted: for something to change. How anger in a couple finds words is the subject of Anger in a relationship: what it is trying to tell you.

Inwards: anger and depression

The third route is the quietest. Anger that may not go towards another person turns towards the only one with whom it is safe — you. “It’s my own fault.” “I’m too sensitive.” “What’s wrong with me that this bothers me.” Instead of “what you did is not all right”, it becomes “something is not all right with me”.

The idea that depression is anger turned inwards is more than a hundred years old; Sigmund Freud described it in 1917. In so simple a form it does not hold — depression has many causes, biological, situational and relational. But something of the idea has survived testing. In a review of the research, the psychiatrist Fredric Busch summarised that people with depression experience, on average, more anger than people without it, and more often hold it in or direct it at themselves. The clinical literature also knows the opposite picture: in some people with depression, anger breaks through in sudden, stormy outbursts that they themselves experience as foreign to their character.

It does not follow that all low mood is hidden anger. Something useful does follow, though: when low mood, listlessness and harsh self-criticism appear together with the sense that you “have no right” to be angry, it is worth asking whom or what you would be angry with if you were allowed. In men, depression in general often shows itself through irritability and withdrawal, which I write about in Depression in men: anger, withdrawal and silence instead of tears. And if low mood lasts for weeks and takes away your sleep, your drive or your pleasure, that is a reason to talk to your GP or a psychiatrist, not only to reflect on anger.

Why calm feels safer

Nobody is born without anger. A baby has it from the first months. An adult who “doesn’t have it” unlearned it somewhere, and usually for a good reason: because anger at home meant danger, because it was reserved for one of the parents, because the good child was the one who caused no trouble. In Slovenia we like to call this “keeping the peace in the house”. I am not developing that part of the story here, because it has its own post: How a child who wasn’t allowed to be angry becomes an adult who can’t say no. What to do with anger that later turns towards the parents themselves is described in Anger at your parents in adulthood: what to do with it.

To understand suppressed anger, one idea from relational family therapy, in which I am training, is enough: emotions that had no room in the family do not disappear but remain unregulated — without a name, without a dose, without the experience that a relationship can bear them. That is why an adult who was not allowed to feel anger often knows only two options: nothing or everything. And because they have seen “everything” and are afraid of it, they choose nothing.

The opposite of suppression is not an outburst

This is where the most common misunderstanding hides. When people hear that holding back is harmful, they conclude that anger must be “let out”: scream into a pillow, smash plates, tell everyone exactly what you think of them. Research does not support this. In 2002 the psychologist Brad Bushman showed that people who “vented” their anger by hitting a punching bag were afterwards angrier and more aggressive than those who simply sat quietly for a few minutes. An outburst does not empty anger; it rehearses it.

Suppression and outburst are more alike than they seem. In both cases the anger does not reach the person it is meant for in a form they could hear. And they are often linked: someone who holds back for a long time eventually snaps over a trifle, frightens themselves and resolves to hold back even harder from now on.

The third option is less dramatic than either. You notice the anger, give it a name and say what happened and what you need — in an ordinary voice, as close to the event as possible. We call this assertiveness, and I describe the practical side in Assertiveness: how to say what you want without aggression or apology. Why anger is in itself a useful force is the subject of Anger is not the problem: how it turns from helplessness into energy for change.

For someone who has been “always calm” for decades, this is easier to write than to do. So the first step is not a conversation with someone else but something much smaller: noticing the anger at all, before you tidy it away.

An exercise: three lines before you tidy it away

The exercise takes five minutes a day and does not require you to say anything to anyone. It has one purpose only: to catch the anger in those few seconds before it becomes tiredness. A study by Matthew Lieberman and colleagues showed that simply naming an emotion in words reduces the amygdala’s response — the emotion doesn’t have to do anything in order to ease a little; it is enough for it to have a name.

1. In the evening, find one moment in the day when you said “it’s fine” or “no problem”. Don’t look for great injustices. A colleague who interrupted you counts, and so does a message left unanswered.
2. Ask the body, not the head. What happened just before you said it? A tightening in the jaw, heat in the face, a held breath, eyes dropping to the floor? Write down what you find.
3. Write the sentence “I was angry because …” and finish it. If the word “angry” won’t come, start with a smaller one: it bothered me, I was disappointed, it got on my nerves. The exercise name the feeling can help.
4. Add: “I would have liked …” Anger almost always guards a need or a boundary. This line tells you which one.
5. Close the notebook. You don’t have to act on anything. After a week or two, read all the lines together and see what repeats: the same person, the same situation, the same need.

If you would like a format that guides you, the knowledge base has an anger diary. And if you find that in two weeks you could not find a single moment, that is information too — perhaps not that there is no anger, but about how early you tidy it away.

Where this explanation does not apply

The story of suppressed anger is appealing because it explains a lot. That is exactly why it needs limits.

Not every calm person is silenced. Some people really do have an even temperament; others have learned over the years that many things are not worth getting worked up about. Calm that leaves you rested and in touch with people is not a symptom. The calm to be suspicious of is the one that exhausts you.

Not all tiredness is anger. Anaemia, the thyroid, sleep disorders, infections, medication, burnout, depression — the list of causes is long and a diary will not solve most of them. If tiredness persists, see your GP first.

Showing anger is not always safe. If you live with someone around whom your silence is a way of avoiding threats or blows, then this is not suppressed anger but a survival judgement, and the advice “say what you feel” can be dangerous. In that case, in Slovenia you can call the SOS helpline for women and children who are victims of violence on 080 11 55, and in immediate danger the police on 113 or emergency services on 112. Something similar holds, in a milder form, for power relations at work; I write about that in Anger at work: the one emotion you’re not allowed to show.

Depression is not only anger turned round. If low mood comes with thoughts that it would be better if you were not here, don’t wait. In Slovenia you can call the mental distress line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (every day from 7 pm to 7 am) or the Samarijan confidential helpline on 116 123 (24 hours a day); you can also turn to your GP or the out-of-hours service.

And sometimes the difficulty is the opposite one. Someone who does not hold anger back but is flooded by it and hurts others in it needs different help from what I describe here. For me, as a therapist in training under supervision, one more thing matters in all this: I do not make diagnoses and I do not assess whether something is depression. What we can do together is look at what has happened to anger in your relationships — then and now. I also work with English-speaking clients, in person in Ljubljana.

What to remember

• Suppressed anger does not disappear: holding back hides the expression but not the experience, and the body pays in tension and tiredness.
• The three most common routes are the body, passive aggression and the turn inwards, into self-criticism and low mood.
• Passive aggression expresses anger without admitting it — which is why it cannot be talked about and nothing changes.
• The opposite of suppression is not an outburst; according to research, “venting” anger strengthens it more than it reduces it.
• The first step is small: notice the anger and name it before you tidy it away. With lasting tiredness or low mood, see a doctor first.