The Myth of Emotional Toughness: Why Suppressing Your Feelings is Weak, Not Strong | (#033) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

We’ve all been fed this lie, “Real strength means never letting anyone see how you really feel,” that the secret to success is locking down your emotions and putting on your best poker face. But the truth is, holding your feelings hostage doesn’t make you strong. It just makes you brittle. Sure, maybe you don’t explode in meetings, but when the pressure is on, you crack. You go numb. You disconnect, and slowly, almost invisibly, you start losing touch with who you really are.

Imagine this for a second. You get that promotion you’ve been chasing, finally land the big client, or you crush your income goals. Everyone around you is patting your back, but inside, you feel nothing. You’re blank, no real joy, no real pride, just a hollow, empty space, and what’s worse is you’re not even sure why. [01:08.0]

I’ve seen this happen over and over with high-performers. They reach their targets, then wonder why the success feels empty. Here’s why—because real emotional strength isn’t the art of avoiding discomfort. It’s the skill of staying present right in the middle of it. Suppressing your emotions doesn’t get rid of them. It buries them alive, and sooner or later, they will claw their way back out, usually at the worst possible moment. You snap at someone you love, sabotage your own success, or just sink deeper into that numb, joyless feeling that life is passing you by.

If you’re tired of living life from behind emotional armor, then stick around. In this episode, we’re dismantling the biggest myth out there, that emotional toughness means feeling less. By the end of this episode, you’ll know exactly how to build the kind of strength that lets you feel more deeply, show up fully and thrive, especially when it counts most. [02:04.2]

I’m David Tian. For over the past almost two decades, I’ve been helping hundreds of thousands of people from over 87 countries find meaning, success and fulfillment in their personal and professional lives—and in this episode, I’ve got three points, and the first one is this. Suppression isn’t strength. It’s avoidance in disguise.

Most of us were taught, directly or indirectly, that being emotional is weak, that strength looks like pushing through no matter what, stiff upper lip or “grin and bear it,” “suck it up,” “don’t let them see you sweat.” Maybe you grew up in a family where no one ever talked about feelings. Maybe you were rewarded for keeping it together. Maybe vulnerability just didn’t feel safe. But here’s the problem now—what we avoid doesn’t actually go away. It festers. What you suppress doesn’t disappear. It just rots in the dark and builds in the background before exploding out of control or sabotaging you from the shadows. [03:05.7]

This shows up in so many different ways. Maybe it’s that one colleague who seems calm and collected all the time, until one day they absolutely blow up over something seemingly tiny, and everyone is like, Where the hell did that come from? Or maybe it’s the guy who is always smiling and easygoing but drinks alone every night, because that’s the only way he knows how to turn the volume down on the chaos inside.

Or maybe it’s more subtle, you just stop feeling much at all. You’re not sad, but you’re not happy either. You’re productive, you’re efficient, but you’re living life like you’re reading it off a script instead of actually experiencing it—and here’s where it gets especially dangerous. High achievers, like many of you listening, are particularly good at looking like they’ve got it all together. You’re disciplined. You get shit done. People probably come to you for advice, but inside, you’re running from something you haven’t faced yet, and the more you run from it, the more it quietly runs your life. [04:09.3]

One of my clients, let’s call him Derek, was a prime example of this, super successful on paper, Ivy League education, started his own company. He made millions before turning 40. But underneath all of that, he had this constant low-level anxiety, like something might fall apart if he didn’t keep grinding. He was always a little on edge, never fully at peace. He couldn’t sleep more than four hours a night unless he knocked himself out with melatonin and alcohol or a lot of sleeping pills.

When we first started working together, he told me, “I don’t really do feelings.” He actually said that, “I don’t do feelings,” as if that was some kind of badge of honor. But over time, what came out was a long pattern of suppressing everything he didn’t want to deal with, the grief over a father who never said he was proud of him, the shame of being cheated on by someone he thought he would marry, the rage he swallowed every time someone crossed a line and he told himself to just be the bigger man. [05:11.0]

He had shoved all of that into some internal box, taped it up and locked it down, and from the outside, he looked like a beast, built, sharp, polished, but on the inside, that internal box was leaking. He was having chronic back pain, digestive issues. He had little or no sex drive. He didn’t feel joy, not really, not for many years.

We started slow and gradual. I taught him how to recognize when his body was signaling a suppressed emotion, how to sit with that discomfort without needing to fix it or to run away, just staying with it, staying in the pocket, breathing through it, letting the emotion and feeling move through him, and to him, it felt really messy, out of control. [06:00.8]

Some sessions, he would shake visibly in his body. Some sessions, he’d cry and say, “I don’t even know why I’m crying,” and that was the work, learning first to stop escaping, to stop armoring up, to stop performing strength and actually start building it.

Then fast-forward six months. He still runs his own company, still is making millions, but now he sleeps like a baby. His wife told him he laughs more in one week now than he used to in an entire year. His back pain is gone. He’s present with his kids, and this may be the biggest, he no longer feels like he has to prove anything to anyone anymore. He’s not hustling from emptiness anymore. That didn’t come from being tough. That came from getting real. [06:51.7]

The thing is, you don’t get strong by avoiding what hurts. You get strong by facing it and being strong enough to let it move through you, because if you don’t, it doesn’t just sit there. It leaks out in sideways jabs, in that vague emptiness, in burnout, addiction, procrastination or panic, in those quiet moments where you wonder, Why am I doing all of this if I still don’t feel enough or okay?

So, if it turns out you’ve been white-knuckling your way through life, thinking that that’s what strength looks like, just know, that is not strength. That’s survival, and it might have been necessary once, but now it’s the thing holding you back. What we’re doing in this episode is learning how to meet discomfort without flinching, to stop running and, finally, stand in the fire without losing yourself. That’s what creates true confidence. That’s what frees up your real energy. That’s how you become the kind of person who doesn’t need to pretend, because there’s nothing left to hide. [07:59.0]

Okay, the second point is this real emotional strength means capacity, not control. This is something most people get completely backwards. They hear or think emotional strength, and they immediately think control, as in suppressing emotions or containing them, or not letting them show. But that’s actually not strength. That’s clenching. That’s tension. That’s trying to keep the lid from blowing off because you’re afraid of what’s underneath.

Real strength isn’t about locking things down tighter. It’s about making your container bigger. It’s like lifting weights. If you’re weak, a 20 kg dumbbell or 45-pound dumbbell might break you. If you’re strong, you barely feel it. The weight doesn’t change. You did. Your capacity increased. Same with emotions. [08:53.4]

Let’s say someone calls you out in public, or your spouse accuses you of something unfair, or you’re leading a high-stakes meeting and everything starts falling apart in real time. Can you stay grounded? Can you breathe deeply? Can you feel everything that’s coming up in the moment without snapping or lashing out, or shutting down or running away? That’s the mark of real emotional strength. Not that you never get triggered, but that you don’t get hijacked, overwhelmed, taken over, blended. Instead, you stay present. You stay connected to yourself and to the people around you, even when it’s uncomfortable or especially when it’s uncomfortable.

The truth is most people don’t train for that. When stress hits, they default to whatever pattern got wired into us as kids. Some people go into fight mode, rage, control, domination. Some go into flight mode, just like avoid, distract, detach or rationalize and. Some go into fawn mode, which is like perform or try to seek approval or curry favor. Others freeze. They go numb or collapse inward, like the air just got sucked out of the room. [10:13.2]

None of those responses are bad per se. They were adaptive once or at some earlier time. They helped you survive. But if you’re still stuck in those patterns now, they will cost you, especially if you’re trying to lead or love or grow. This is where emotional training comes in and, yes, it’s training, just like you train your body to be stronger, faster, more resilient under pressure, you can train your nervous system to hold more emotional intensity without breaking down.

I call this emotional stress inoculation, the process of gradually and deliberately increasing your exposure to emotional discomfort, not to overwhelm yourself, but to expand your range, your capacity, to stretch your window of tolerance, so that over time, what used to knock you over now barely shakes you. For most people, this is a huge paradigm shift. [11:15.5]

Let’s say you’re used to avoiding conflict. Even small tension makes you anxious, so you avoid tough conversations or you sugarcoat everything until nobody knows what you really mean. You tell yourself you’re being nice, but really you just don’t trust yourself to stay calm if things get messy.

Now, imagine training that part of you, instead of running from the heat, you learn to stay in it. Stay in the pocket. You practice speaking your truth, even if your voice shakes. You feel the fear rise up in your body, and instead of numbing out or snapping or lashing out, you ride through it. You breathe deeply. You stay with it. You get to the other side. [11:59.2]

That’s capacity. That’s how you build emotional range. Just like increasing your VO₂ max or your max deadlift, you raise your internal threshold. The next time you’re under fire, whether it’s your boss, your spouse or your own inner critic, you don’t collapse. You hold steady, stay in the pocket, and you respond instead of just reacting.

One of my clients, let’s call her Melissa, was a high-level executive at a major company. She had a great résumé. She had the confidence, the sharpness, but under pressure, she’d either go icy cold or go into damage-control mode. She’d micromanage, overtalk, bulldoze over others, and then afterwards feel like crap for it. She didn’t want to lead that way. It just kind of possessed her, took her over. [12:52.0]

In our work together, we trained her capacity, starting with breath work and body scans. Then we moved into exposure practices, deliberately bringing up scenarios that triggered her old patterns and staying with the emotional wave, riding the wave without getting pulled under. Over time, her internal signal changed. Stress didn’t feel like a threat anymore. It became a message, something to listen to, not fear.

By the time we were a few months in, her whole team started commenting on how calm she’d become. One guy said, “You’re like a storm anchor now,” which, if you knew how reactive she used to be, was wild. It was really surprising even to her, and that’s the power of training emotional capacity. When your inner space expands, the external chaos doesn’t control you anymore. So, if you’ve been trying to chase control, trying to keep everything neat and contained, just know that’s not strength. That’s survival mode and it is exhausting. [13:56.3]

Strength is when you can feel everything and still choose how you show up. Strength is when your system gets hit with anxiety or shame, or anger or panic, and you hold the line and you don’t flinch, you stay. You don’t collapse. Stay in the pocket. You don’t explode. You stay, and that’s what I want for you, not to suppress more, not to bottle it up, but to grow bigger inside, to raise your threshold, to expand your capacity, to become someone who can hold the intensity of real life, love, risk, purpose, leadership, without having to shut down or getting thrown off. [14:37.8]

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, my third and final point is that numbness isn’t mastery. It’s the first sign that you disconnected. Now, this one is really tricky, because numbness doesn’t usually feel like a problem. In fact, a lot of high-achievers wear it like a badge, like they say, “I don’t get emotional,” or “I stay cool under pressure,” or “I don’t let things get to me.” Sounds like control, right? Sounds like confidence. But most of the time, it’s just shut down. [15:57.5]

It’s the nervous system flipping the switch to survival mode, where it dulls your emotional range to keep you from feeling too much, and at some point in your life, that probably was the smarter move to make. But if you’re still operating like that now as an adult, you’re running a high-performance engine with the spark plugs pulled out. When you’re numb, you’re not avoiding just the pain. You’re numbing the joy, too. You’re not just freezing the sadness. You’re freezing your ability to feel excitement, connection, purpose. You can’t selectively numb emotions. That’s not how human psychology works.

Do you ever notice how people who have trained themselves to not feel too much also don’t laugh that hard? Don’t cry during moving movies? Don’t get truly moved by art or music, or moments with the people they supposedly love? They’ve built walls to keep the pain out, but those same walls are keeping the good stuff out, too, intimacy, joy, wonder, all of it. [17:02.5]

I’ve worked with many clients who have achieved incredible levels of external success. They’ve built eight- and nine-figure companies, closed billion-dollar deals, led global teams, but inside, they’re actually bored. Not on the outside, on the inside, like life is technically good, but they’re really not into it. They’re watching it like a movie they’ve already seen, going through the motions, waiting for the credits to roll.

One man I coached, let’s call him James, told me he hadn’t cried in over 20 years, but he said it like it was a flex. But when we dug a little deeper, he admitted he also hadn’t really felt proud of anything in 20 years either or deeply moved, or lit up with love. He’d learned to cut the cord on pain, emotional pain, and unknowingly cut the cord on everything that made life worth living. That’s the trap of numbness, becoming a master of getting things done while feeling less and less connected to the reason you started doing those things in the first place. [18:06.7]

If this is you, if you’ve been stuck in this kind of quiet, dull ache, like something important is missing, but you can’t name it, then the work ahead of you isn’t more efficiency. It’s not another productivity system or habit stack, or morning routine. It’s the courage to feel deeply again.

Yes, I get it. It can be terrifying, especially if you’re someone who had to grow up fast, someone who didn’t get the space to feel safely, who had to armor up early in life and move through life like a machine. But the thing is, that part of you that is armored up is still thinking that it needs to protect you. It still believes feeling deeply will cost you something. It doesn’t realize that the armor has already cost you more than you know, because disconnection has a price. [18:58.6]

You might not see it right away, but it’ll show up over time in the relationship that never quite feels right, in the friendships that all stay surface level, in the career that looks impressive but feels flat in the endless search for the next thing to chase because nothing ever really lands. You might start to wonder, Why does none of this feel the way it’s supposed to? It’s not that you’re broken. It’s not that you haven’t done enough. It’s that you’ve built success on a system that doesn’t allow for real, true emotion, and now that system is capping your growth, because the next level isn’t harder. It’s deeper. It’s letting yourself feel fully without falling apart, and that is real emotional strength.

It’s easy to stay locked down. It’s easy to act like nothing touches you, but it takes actual strength and courage to open your heart and keep it open, even when things don’t go your way, even when people disappoint you, even when it hurts, or especially when it hurts. [20:07.3]

So, if you’ve been equating numbness with maturity, or thinking that your ability to stay cool is proof that you’ve mastered your emotions, know this—mastery isn’t cold. It’s not robotic. It’s not about eliminating emotion. Mastery here is staying present in the midst of the storm. It’s being able to feel sadness fully without getting swallowed by it, to feel joy without clinging to it, to feel anger without fully becoming it. It’s being able to open your chest and stay there, open even when every instinct says to close up and hide. [20:49.1]

That’s the true path forward and that’s what we’re building here, not stereotypical stoicism, not numbness, not detachment, not more armor. Openness, presence, capacity. If you’re ready to stop going through life half asleep, if you’re ready to stop performing strength and actually live from it, then this is where it starts. This is the work.

Let’s bring this all together.

First, we called out the myth that suppression is strength. It’s not. It’s avoidance. The stuff you push down doesn’t stay quiet. It builds up. It leaks out. It eventually bites you in the ass when you least expect it.

Second, real emotional strength isn’t about controlling your feelings. It’s about increasing your capacity to bear them. The same way you train your body to carry more weight, you can train your system to carry more emotion without collapsing, shutting down or blowing up.

Third, numbness isn’t a sign you’ve got it all figured out. It’s actually a big red flag. If you’re feeling flat, checked out or like you’re just coasting through life, it doesn’t mean you’re emotionally evolved. It usually means you’ve disconnected from the parts of you that actually make life meaningful. [22:07.5]

I want to wrap up with a story that ties all three of these together. One of my clients, let’s call him Ray, came to me after a big business failure. He had co-founded a startup, had raised multiple millions, and then his co-founder blindsided him and everything collapsed, and his response was that he didn’t feel much. He just got back to work, tried to keep grinding, told himself, “This is what winners do,” except within six months, he had lost his girlfriend, pushed away all of his closest friends, and developed a really bad case of insomnia every night.

When we started working together, he was calm on the surface, but actually hollow underneath it. He wasn’t exploding visibly. He was imploding. He’d spent years perfecting the art of emotional self-control, which really just meant repressing, suppressing everything that felt uncomfortable. We spent months helping him build the capacity to sit in his own discomfort, to stop bracing against pain and instead let himself feel it without judgment. [23:09.8]

Then, eventually, something wild happened. As he allowed himself to feel sadness and grief for the first time in years, as far as he can remember, he also started laughing more, sleeping better, taking creative risks again, even reconnected with his dad after years of radio silence. The guy who used to see emotions as a liability became a leader that people actually wanted to follow, because now he was authentic. He was real. That’s the difference emotional strength makes, not just in how you feel, but in who you become.

Thank you so much for listening. If this has helped you in any way, please share it with anyone that you think could benefit from it. If you liked it, hit a like or give it a good rating on whatever platform you’re listening to this on. If you have any feedback whatsoever, I’d love to get it. Leave a comment or send me a message. I’d love to hear your feedback.I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. Until then, David Tian, signing out. [24:09.4]