7 things in life you should always keep private, according to psychology

We are living in the age of public interiors. At any given moment, someone is unburdening themselves to a camera lens, posting screenshots of private messages, sharing the deepest swells of their ambition or despair—often in the same breath. We’ve come to believe that transparency is a form of intimacy, that confession draws us closer. But what if the opposite is true? What if all this sharing is quietly corroding the very relationships we hope to build?

It’s a strange contradiction of modern life: the more we speak, the less we’re heard. Somewhere along the line, privacy became suspicious. To withhold became a sin against authenticity. We were told, implicitly and often, that silence is shame. That keeping something to ourselves means we must be hiding something from others. So we began to tell everything. Or at least, we began to curate the appearance of telling everything. And now, we’re tired.

Psychology has a name for what’s been lost: Social Penetration Theory. Coined in the 1970s by psychologists Irwin Altman and Dalmas Taylor, it proposed something counterintuitive even then—that intimacy is not forged by rapid openness, but by layered revelation. That we should unfold ourselves gradually, like an onion, not crack ourselves open like eggs. Most people today would nod at this and then upload a breakdown on Instagram.

But Altman and Taylor were onto something more profound than a metaphor. Their theory suggested that the very fabric of human trust depends on regulation—what we choose to share, when, and with whom. Not because we are dishonest, but because we are porous. Flood someone with too much too soon, and you’ll drown the very bond you’re trying to build. Hold too much back for too long, and you become unreadable. The art lies in the timing. The tragedy is that we’ve lost the rhythm.

I’ve noticed this most sharply in conversations that begin with hope. Someone confides a goal—a book they want to write, a move they’re planning, a business idea they’re quietly nurturing—and almost immediately, that quietness becomes a problem. Should they announce it? Manifest it? Make it public to hold themselves accountable? The prevailing advice is yes. But the research suggests otherwise. A set of studies, popularized by Derek Sivers and explored in behavioral science circles, shows that declaring your goals can actually reduce your likelihood of achieving them. It creates a premature sense of completion, a neurological satisfaction that saps the motivation to act. In other words, saying it replaces doing it. The moment you make it public, it becomes symbolic. A performance. And performances rarely sustain the messiness that real ambition requires.

I’ve done this myself, more times than I’d like to admit. Told someone about a project too early, mistaking the buzz of their affirmation for momentum. Days later, the idea felt stale, overexposed, deadened by the echo of someone else’s excitement. It didn’t belong to me anymore. It belonged to their perception of me. So I stopped.

There are other things that seem to wilt under exposure, and money is one of them. No topic is more curiously combustible. Share too little, and you risk being seen as secretive or elitist. Share too much, and you invite comparison, envy, projection. I’ve been on both sides of that equation—wondering what someone is hiding, and resenting what someone reveals. Money does not like light. Or perhaps more precisely: money exposed too bluntly warps the field around it. The moment it enters a conversation, it alters the gravitational pull. What began as connection becomes negotiation. What felt mutual starts to tilt.

And yet we’re encouraged to share, always. Share how much you earn, share what you spent, share what you invested in and what you regret. We pretend it’s about financial literacy or social justice, but often it’s a hunger to locate ourselves in a hierarchy. Where do I sit in the economic food chain? Who am I doing better than? Who is outpacing me? The illusion is that this gives us clarity. The reality is that it often just deepens our anxiety.

Money is not the only thing that creates distortion under scrutiny. Romantic relationships—especially the private tensions that live inside them—are almost impossible to share without altering their nature. We've all been tempted to talk about a fight, to vent about a partner’s strange habit, or to recount a moment of emotional distance like a parable. Sometimes this happens innocently enough, passed off as humor or small talk. But even when well-intentioned, something shifts the moment you let someone else into that room.

Trust, after all, is not just about fidelity—it’s about containment. The unspoken agreement between two people that certain things will stay in the room where they happened. Break that boundary too often, even with close friends, and the relationship becomes porous in ways you can’t always repair. I've learned this the hard way: what feels like harmless storytelling can be received as betrayal. And once it leaves your mouth, it’s no longer yours to shape. It takes on a life of its own—filtered, interpreted, passed around.

This is not to say we should keep everything bottled up. There is such a thing as suffocating in your own silence. But there is also such a thing as self-respect. As stewardship of the emotional soil a relationship grows in. Psychology doesn’t offer an easy binary here—there’s no clean line between oversharing and necessary catharsis—but it does point to patterns. According to the framework of Social Penetration Theory, disclosing sensitive relational experiences before the recipient has demonstrated trustworthiness or emotional capacity can rupture intimacy rather than deepen it. The container matters as much as the content.

This brings me to something more tender—mental health. In theory, we’re now freer than ever to talk about it. In practice, the freedom can feel more performative than safe. Yes, we post about our anxiety, our burnout, our therapy sessions. But how often are we doing it from a place of genuine integration? And how often are we narrating our pain for social approval, for connection, or even for a kind of credibility? Pain, after all, has cultural currency now. There's a way to talk about it that earns you points. And there's a way to talk about it that makes people back away slowly. Most of us are still figuring out the difference.

The literature on self-concealment complicates this picture. Researchers have shown that people who habitually hide distressing thoughts or feelings are more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, and even physical illness. According to an overview on self-concealment, secrecy itself can be corrosive. But so can disclosure without discernment. The damage isn't just in hiding. It’s in revealing yourself to the wrong audience. Or in feeling compelled to explain parts of yourself that were never owed to anyone in the first place.

I've sat in rooms where someone said too much too fast. A stranger on a retreat. A date who mistook me for a therapist. A colleague who unloaded what should have been reserved for someone closer. And though I nodded, asked questions, tried to hold space—I felt that subtle recoil, that quiet internal “no.” Not because I judged them, but because the intimacy was unearned. Because I hadn't shown I could carry it, and yet they handed it to me anyway. That kind of sharing doesn’t create connection. It creates discomfort. Sometimes even resentment.

We don’t talk enough about the burden of knowing too much. Of having access to parts of people we weren’t meant to witness yet. This is a relatively modern problem. Before the internet, before the therapeutic aesthetic of TikTok and Twitter, you had to earn your way into someone’s inner life. Now, all it takes is a swipe. You can know someone’s trauma history before you know their last name. You can see someone cry before you’ve heard them laugh. The sequencing is off. The pacing is broken.

I think about this often—what it means to protect our pace. Not just in relationships, but in life itself. Some things need time to grow in the dark. A new idea. A spiritual insight. A shift in identity. Share them too early and they lose their shape, like dough pulled before it’s risen. Share them with the wrong person and they harden defensively, altered by someone else’s gaze. There is wisdom, even beauty, in discretion. Not secrecy for its own sake, but privacy as a kind of sacred architecture. A choice to build inward before opening the door.

Spiritual beliefs fall into this space, too. Not the kind worn like fashion—quotes on social feeds or lifestyle branding—but the quieter kind, forged in solitude, doubt, experience. What you believe about suffering, fate, death—these things are often too fragile to withstand casual handling. They need reverence. Not performance. Not debate. And certainly not premature translation. The best of them are not ideas we arrive at. They are places we are drawn into. Not everything needs to be spoken to be shared.

The same is true for our families. If love is messy, family love is messier. It’s full of contradictions and scars and small kindnesses that no one else can interpret correctly. It’s tempting to turn that chaos into story—especially in moments of rupture. To frame a parent as narcissistic, or a sibling as toxic, or a childhood as broken. Maybe those things are true. Maybe they aren’t. But even truth can be misused. Family stories, when told too freely, often become weapons. Or worse, entertainment. They stop being yours. They become memes, diagnoses, tweets. And something essential gets flattened in the process.

I sometimes wonder what we’re trying to prove with all this openness. That we’re honest? That we’re good? That we’re healing? Maybe. But there’s also a hunger beneath it—a desire to be known so completely that nothing is left unspoken. As if total transparency could finally earn us the love we were denied. It’s a beautiful impulse. And a dangerous one. Because love, real love, doesn’t come from knowing everything about someone. It comes from having earned the right to know what they chose to share.

And then there’s virtue—perhaps the most paradoxical thing of all to speak about. Acts of goodness, generosity, restraint. The world tells us to document them. To post receipts of kindness. To narrate the moral arc of our days. But the older I get, the more I believe that virtue loses something when it’s announced. The most powerful goodness I’ve witnessed has been quiet, even invisible. The friend who showed up without explanation. The stranger who paid and walked away. The people who did not need an audience to justify their choices.

Maybe that’s what all of this comes down to: an audience. Who are we speaking for when we speak? Who are we imagining when we open our mouths or our feeds or our hearts? The best disclosures—the ones that deepen rather than diminish us—come when we are not trying to perform. When we are not managing perception. When we are simply responding to the moment, the person, the real connection.

Psychology gives us frameworks. Social Penetration Theory reminds us that intimacy is built in layers, not leaps. Research on self-concealment reminds us that hiding can hurt—but so can exposure without safety. These ideas don’t give us rules. They offer mirrors. And what they reflect is the complexity of being human in a world that encourages spectacle.

So here are the things I now try to keep close: the goals that still feel tender. The money I don’t need to explain. The conflicts I haven’t fully metabolized. The beliefs I’m still forming. The private moments in love that are beautiful precisely because no one else saw them. Not because I am ashamed. But because I am learning to tell the difference between intimacy and exhibition. Between being seen and being known.

It’s a quieter path, this one. But there’s a kind of freedom in it. A kind of clarity. Not everything needs to be said. Not everything is content. Some things are just life—lived, felt, and kept, for once, entirely your own.