The Silent Way Emotional Avoidance Destroys Success | (#035) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

There’s a level of freedom most people never reach. It’s when you can feel any emotion, like grief, fear, rage, shame, and not collapse. You don’t run. You don’t numb out. You stay fully present, connected, grounded, and because of that, you don’t live in fear of being exposed. You don’t second-guess every decision. You don’t need validation from anyone to know that you’re enough. You stop reacting. You start responding, and life stops feeling like something that you’re barely managing and starts feeling like something you’re actually living.

That kind of inner strength is rare, but it’s not reserved for monks or therapists, or people with childhoods full of rainbows. It’s a skill and it can be trained and mastered, and that’s what we’re diving into today, because if you don’t train emotional strength, the costs sneaks up on you slowly, quietly. [01:10.7]

You’ll look like you’re holding it all together. You’ll check the boxes, play the part, maybe even win some applause, but inside, you’ll be exhausted, jittery, flat. You’ll wonder why nothing feels as satisfying or fulfilling as it should. You’ll work harder, achieve more, and still feel like something’s missing. Relationships will start to feel like landmines, or worse, like work.

You’ll be successful, but disconnected, respected, but alone, busy, but bored, and the worst part is that you’ll keep blaming yourself for it, thinking you just need to try harder, be tougher, get more disciplined. But the real problem is no one ever taught you how to feel your emotions in a way that makes you stronger instead of weaker. That’s where we’re going in this episode, what happens when you avoid your emotions and what happens when you finally stop and feel through them. [02:04.1]

I’m David Tian. For almost the past two decades, I’ve been helping hundreds of thousands of people from over 87 countries find fulfillment, success and meaning in their personal and professional lives. In this episode, I’ve got three points to walk you through, and here is the first—emotional avoidance has a cost, even if it doesn’t explode right away.

Most high-achievers don’t think of themselves as emotionally avoidant. They think of themselves as focused or calm under pressure, but a lot of the time that calm is faked. It’s not real confidence. It’s more like shut down. Yeah, maybe you’re not crying in meetings or snapping at your team. Maybe you’re keeping a cool head on the outside, but inside your body is still responding. Your nervous system is working overtime to hold the lid down. [02:53.0]

That tension doesn’t just vanish. It gets stored and the science backs this up. Researchers like Robert Levenson and James Gross at Stanford University found that people who suppress their emotions, who try to control what they’re feeling without expressing it, actually show higher levels of stress. Their heart rates go up. Their blood pressure spikes. Their cortisol surges. Even when they look composed, their bodies are actually in fight or flight mode.

Now stretch that out over months or years or decades. That chronic internal pressure is what scientists call allostatic load. It’s the cumulative wear and tear on your body from carrying too much stress for too long. A 2018 meta-analysis published in Health Psychology journal shows that emotional suppression directly increases this load, leading to everything from fatigue and insomnia to inflammation, digestive issues, cardiovascular problems and a lot more.

So, yeah, you might look like you’re in control from the outside, but what’s happening under the hood is that you’re eroding your own system, physically, mentally and emotionally, and it doesn’t just hit your health, it hits your performance, too. [04:09.2]

Studies in neuroscience have shown that emotional suppression disrupts the brain’s default mode network. This is the part of your brain that governs introspection, creativity and self-reflection. When you’re emotionally shut down, you can’t access your full range. You lose clarity. You stop thinking deeply. You operate like a high-end machine that’s stuck in first gear.

You might still be productive, but it’s robotic and feels empty. The joy gets sucked out of the work. You stop caring. You stop being creative. You stop thinking outside the box. You stop seeing the bigger picture. You get through the day, but you don’t feel anything. You tell yourself you’re being efficient, but what you’re really doing is just surviving. [04:56.8]

I had a client a while back who was a partner at a big law firm, and when we started working together, he said, “I’ve hacked the system. I can compartmentalize anything,” and, yeah, it made him effective at work, ruthless even, but when we dug deeper, he hadn’t slept more than four hours a night in months. He was constantly sick. He had no close friends. The girlfriend that he was dating had broken up with him because she said she’d never felt him emotionally present. That’s the cost.

Avoidance is expensive. It drains your health, your relationships, your energy, your creativity, and eventually, your will to keep pushing. It creeps in so slowly that you barely notice. You just wake up one day and realize you’ve lost the spark. The ambition is still there, but the meaning is gone. You’re still just checking the boxes, still meeting the goals, but none of it lands. You’re numb. [05:54.8]

The catch is because you’ve trained yourself to ignore your emotions, you don’t even know what’s really wrong. You just feel this background noise of dissatisfaction. Maybe you try harder. Maybe you reach for another hit of validation. But it doesn’t help, not for long, and it won’t until you stop pretending emotional pain can be managed by working more or thinking harder.

Avoidance is seductive because it looks like control, but it’s not. It’s self-abandonment. It’s high-functioning survival mode, and eventually, it breaks you down. You don’t have to be in a breakdown to be on the edge of burnout, and if you’re waking up already tired, if your body is always tense, if your winds feel flat and your relationships feel shallow, this might very well be why. You’ve been holding down your emotional life like it’s a threat, instead of learning how to work with it. [06:57.4]

But here’s the good news—your emotions aren’t trying to destroy you. They’re trying to wake you up. What looks like anxiety or anger or sadness on the surface is usually your system begging you to pay attention to something important, something real, something you’ve been avoiding for years.

Once you stop running, once you actually learn how to face those emotions without judgment, without shame, that’s when everything starts to change. That’s when the energy you’ve been using to suppress your feelings gets freed up, and that’s when you start to feel whole again. But that takes training. It doesn’t come from reading another book or telling yourself to just stay calm. It comes from learning how to feel, regulate and process your emotions like a mature, wise adult, not like a robot or a machine, and that’s what emotional strength really is. [07:51.4]

Okay, on to the second point. What you avoid doesn’t just go away. It leaks out somewhere. You might think you’ve got your emotions under control. Maybe you’ve convinced yourself you’re past it, whatever it is. The fight you had with your dad 10 years ago or that breakup that left a crater in your chest, the betrayal you never fully processed—maybe you’ve filed it all away in a mental folder labeled “Done.” But your body has a different filing system. Your body doesn’t forget.

The research backs this up. The latest studies on interoception—that’s your body’s ability to feel and interpret its own internal signals—these studies show that when you suppress emotions, your nervous system doesn’t just drop it. It stores it and that storage shows up physically like a tight jaw or stiff neck or gut issues, digestive problems, chest pressure that you’ve normalized as stress or just being tired.

One of the leading researchers in this space, Hugo Critchley from the University of Oxford, showed how unresolved emotional tension manifests in the body as everything from migraines to irritable bowel syndrome to autoimmune flares. Your body becomes the outlet for what your mind refuses to deal with—and it’s not just your physical body. It leaks into how you show up in relationships. [09:17.0]

Even if you’re not outwardly yelling or crying, those emotions don’t just stay buried. They sneak out in your tone of voice, in your facial expressions, in how you cut people off mid-sentence without realizing it, or how you suddenly feel irritated over the smallest thing and can’t figure out why.

The Stanford psychologist James Gross, same guy I mentioned earlier, did a study with Oliver John that showed people who chronically suppress their emotions actually experience less empathy. When you numb your own emotions, you lose sensitivity to other people’s emotions, too, which means connection becomes harder, compassion becomes harder, even just enjoying being around other human beings becomes harder. This is why your emotional control can actually push people away. They might not know what’s wrong with you, but they feel it, that subtle wall you put up, the performance, the distance. [10:11.0]

I had a client who was a successful entrepreneur. When he came to me, who was in his late-30s. Let’s call him Matt. He was great at business, but terrible at interpersonal relationships. He kept attracting women who would say the same thing about three months in: “I don’t feel like I really know you, Matt.”

Now, from his point of view, he was being the ideal partner. He was polite. He was consistent, reliable, never dramatic. But in a way, that was the problem. He was emotionally flat-lining. He was always fine, never vulnerable, never open, never raw, never honest and authentic, because vulnerability meant risk to him and risk meant pain to him, and he had a lifetime of avoiding both. [10:55.6]

It turns out that he had spent years suppressing the grief of his mother’s sudden death when he was early in high school. He never talked about it with anyone, couldn’t process it with anyone. He just shoved it down and kept going and that emotional freeze hardened into a pattern. He wasn’t cold. He was frozen and that freeze leaked into every romantic relationship that he tried to build after that.

Once we started working on it, he noticed something really crazy. The more he allowed himself to feel, even when it was messy to him or even when he didn’t have words for it, but the more present he became, not just in relationships, but in everything, work, creativity, sex, just play, joy started sneaking back into his life, because once he stopped avoiding pain, he made space for everything else—and this is the cost of suppression and repression. It’s not just about the emotions you’re avoiding. It’s about the parts of yourself you’ve locked away along with them. [12:00.6]

When you repress anger, you also suppress assertiveness and your natural motivation for standing up against injustice. When you suppress sadness, you lose access to tenderness and compassion. When you suppress fear, you start living behind glass, safe maybe, but disconnected and fragile.

In a famous 2021 study published in the Nature Reviews Neuroscience [it was] emphasized how unprocessed emotional experiences shape our limbic system, the part of the brain and down through the spine to the rest of your body that governs emotional and behavioral patterns. When our limbic system goes unchecked, it creates unconscious loops. You keep reliving the same reactions, the same shutdowns, the same regrets.

Without even knowing why, it just gets triggered, and that’s where most people get stuck. They think it’s just who they are. “I’m just not emotional,” or “I’m just a bit closed off,” or “I’m just wired this way.” No, actually, you’re not. You’ve trained yourself, consciously or not, to avoid what hurts, and that avoidance is now a habit your body and brain thinks is normal and has actually forgotten about. It is running unconsciously in the background. [13:15.1]

The truth is, it’s not neutral. It’s costing you more than you think. If your relationships feel shallow, if you’re constantly tense, if you can’t remember the last time you felt fully alive, if you’re waking up already tired, there’s probably something inside you that hasn’t been felt yet and it’s leaking through into the rest of your life.

You can’t outrun your own emotional truth. You can delay it. You can distract from it. You can numb it, but at some point it starts catching up. Sometimes that shows up as burnout, sometimes as loneliness, sometimes as a quiet inner voice that whispers, “This isn’t it.” That voice is the part of you that’s still waiting to be heard. The only way forward is to turn toward it, not away from it. [14:04.7]

Many high-achievers struggle when it comes to managing their emotions or navigating their relationships, and they hit a wall when it comes to emotional mastery. Maybe you’ve noticed that stress, frustration or anger is seeping into your personal or professional life, or you feel disconnected from those you care about.

That’s where David Tian’s “Emotional Mastery” program comes in. It’s based on peer-reviewed, evidence-backed therapeutic methods to help you find happiness, love and real fulfillment. Learn how to break free from the emotional roller-coaster and start thriving in every area of your life. You can find out more at DavidTianPhD.com/EmotionalMastery. That’s D-A-V-I-D-T-I-A-N-P-H-D [dot] com [slash] emotional mastery.

Now we move to the third and final point—you can’t perform your way out of emotional disconnection. No matter how sharp you are, no matter how many books you’ve read or how many podcasts you’ve heard, or how many goals you’ve crushed, if you’re emotionally disconnected, none of it will land for you. You’ll keep doing more. You’ll keep chasing milestones, but the fulfillment you’re seeking won’t come. It can’t, because performance doesn’t heal what’s missing.

This is one of the hardest truths for high-achievers to swallow, because they’ve built their entire identity on performing well, on solving problems, on doing things right. They’ve gotten used to proving their worth by outperforming everyone else around them, and for a while it worked. You got the rewards, you got the respect, but then one day, you hit all your goals and it still doesn’t feel like enough. [15:53.0]

That emptiness is from disconnection and no amount of external success can fill it. The research backs this up over and over. The longest-running study in human history, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which tracked hundreds, already now thousands of people, across eight decades, found that the number one factor in long term wellbeing isn’t money, career success or IQ. It’s emotional connection, not just with others, but maybe even more importantly, with yourself.

The people who lived the longest, were the happiest and had the most meaningful lives, they weren’t the ones with perfect résumés. They were the ones who cultivated deep relationships, who learned how to stay present with their emotions, who didn’t need to perform to feel like they mattered.

But most high-performers miss this. They think connection comes later, after they hit that next target and after they get just a little more free time, after they’ve proved themselves worthy. But the longer you ignore connection, the harder it is to find your way back to it. [17:01.8]

I had a client once who was a senior executive at a global consulting firm. He was a brilliant strategist, constantly in demand, traveling internationally all the time. He could walk into any boardroom and run the table, he told me, but he also told me with zero irony, “I have no idea what I actually feel anymore,” and he wasn’t joking. He had spent so many years cutting himself off from his emotional life because he thought it was a liability that he had lost the ability to access them. This includes accessing joy or sadness, or meaning. Everything was just muted, black and white.

Now, he wasn’t in a crisis. On paper, his life looked flawless, but he couldn’t feel any of it. Nothing registered for him anymore. He had reached the top of his ladder and realized he had been climbing numb, and that’s what emotional disconnection does to you. It deadens you. You start living on autopilot. You stop taking risks. You stop loving fully. You stop laughing from deep in your gut. You just keep performing, going through the motions, and people applaud you, but deep down, you know something is off. [18:11.8]

Here’s what all the research says—emotional intelligence is a stronger predictor of leadership success, relationship satisfaction and long-term happiness than general IQ. That’s from multiple studies across many decades. The leaders who thrive aren’t the ones who have all the answers. They’re the ones who can stay grounded when tension rises, who can stay open under pressure, who can actually feel through what’s happening without being overwhelmed by it or fleeing from it.

But emotional intelligence isn’t just some nice add-on. It’s a survival skill, too, because if you don’t have emotional range, if you don’t have emotional capacity, you’re not operating at full power or at your full potential. You’re playing with a really limited toolkit, and the cost is that you start to resent the very life you worked so hard to build. You start to push people away without even realizing it. You start looking for bigger wins, just to feel something, anything. [19:14.5]

The saddest part is this is all avoidable if you’re willing to stop performing and start feeling through. But that means facing what you’ve buried. That means being honest with yourself about the parts of you that you’ve exiled or ignored or abandoned for years, the scared parts, the ashamed parts, the lonely parts, the ones that don’t look good on your LinkedIn profile. That is real strength, not pretending to be unfazed, not faking calm when your insides are a mess.

Emotional strength is being able to feel fully through without losing yourself in it. It’s being able to stay present with pain, with joy, with grief, with love. It’s having the courage to not perform, and you can actually learn this, train it, master it, just like you train anything else. [20:05.4]

Emotional strength isn’t something you either have or you don’t. It’s like a muscle, and most people have been skipping that workout their whole lives. But if you start training it, if you start tuning in instead of tuning out, then life begins to open up, not all at once, but slowly, in ways that actually matter.

You start to feel proud of who you are, not just what you’ve done. You stop bracing for impact every time you open up. You start showing up for your own life fully, and when you do that, success stops feeling like a performance, and it starts feeling like a homecoming, like peace. That’s what’s waiting for you when you stop chasing and start connecting. That is emotional strength.

Let’s bring it all together. We’ve covered three core points in this episode.

First, emotional avoidance has a cost, even when it doesn’t look dramatic. Just because you’re not falling apart on the outside doesn’t mean your system isn’t overloaded. Suppression and repression build pressure, and that pressure wears you down mentally, physically, emotionally, until life feels more like endurance rather than living. [21:15.3]

Second, what you avoid, it doesn’t disappear. It leaks out in your body, in your relationships, in your tone of voice, in your habits. The emotions you refuse to face don’t stay hidden forever. They show up sideways and usually when it matters most.

Third, you can’t perform your way out of disconnection. You can’t outwork emptiness. Success without emotional connection leads to burnout, resentment, and that creeping feeling that none of it really means anything because it doesn’t if you’re too disconnected to feel any of it.

Now, if you ignore all of this, if you keep powering through, numbing out, telling yourself you’re fine, then your life may look good on the outside, but on the inside it’s going to feel flat, cold, drained, empty, and meaningless. You’ll keep hitting your goals, but each one will feel emptier than the last. [22:07.8]

This is a kind of living hell. You’ll start to wonder what the point is, and maybe you’ll never say that out loud, but you’ll feel it quietly and constantly. Relationships will suffer. Joy will feel foreign, and you’ll spend years, decades, achieving things that you don’t even enjoy, until eventually, you crash.

But that doesn’t have to be where this story ends, because there’s another way forward, a life where emotions aren’t the enemy, where presence is stronger than pressure, where you can stay grounded in the middle of intensity because you’ve trained for it. You stop reacting and you start responding. You stop performing and you start connecting, and you stop living on autopilot and start living with your full Self online, and that’s the life that opens up when you build emotional strength and it’s possible. You can start now. [22:57.4]

Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this, if you liked it, hit a like or give it a good rating on whatever platform you’re hearing this on. If this has helped you, please send it to anyone else that you think could benefit from it. If you have any feedback whatsoever, I’d love to get it. Leave a comment or send me a message. I’d love to get your feedback.Thank you, again, so much for listening. I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. Until then, David Tian, signing out. [23:18.6]