"If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself," George Orwell once wrote. A study, however, suggests that may be even harder than it sounds.
The research found that people carry about nine kinds of secrets on average — and that these private matters have an awkward habit of resurfacing in our thoughts when we would rather they did not.
The work, by psychologists at the University of Melbourne and Columbia Business School, tried to shed light on what it feels like to live with a secret.
They carried out two studies, seeking to track people's everyday experiences. The first involved 240 British adults who kept a daily diary for two weeks, writing about the most important thing they kept hidden. Each evening they reported whether they had thought about the secret, how those thoughts arose and what emotions accompanied them.
They did not disclose the details of their secrets. Instead, they were asked whether they fell into any of 38 categories.
On average, the participants reported keeping nine types of secret. The most common involved having lied (reported by 78 per cent) and dissatisfaction with an aspect of their physical appearance (71 per cent). The next most common categories were financial secrets (70 per cent), secret romantic desires (63 per cent) and intimate behaviors (57 per cent).
Previous work had found that people think about their secrets about 30 times a week — far more often than they find themselves taking measures to conceal them from others.
The research examined what those thoughts look like. In 30 per cent of the daily diary reports, participants said they revolved around worries or concerns involving the hidden fact. In 24 per cent, they wondered what others might think if it were discovered. Fantasising or daydreaming about the secret appeared in 22 per cent of reports.
Practical thoughts about keeping the secret were rarer: just 11 per cent involved pondering over how to conceal it and 5 per cent about whether to reveal it.
The researchers tried to distinguish between moments when people intentionally allowed their thoughts to engage with a secret and spontaneous mind-wandering, when the thought appeared unexpectedly while they were meant to be focusing on something else.
It was the latter that proved troublesome. When people reported spontaneous thoughts about their secret, they also tended to experience stronger negative emotions such as guilt, anxiety or embarrassment. Days when such thoughts occurred more frequently were days when people felt worse about their secret overall.
In a second study, 207 volunteers received prompts on their smartphones eight times a day for a week, asking whether they had recently thought about the secret they regarded as most important and how they felt about it. If they had not been thinking about their secret beforehand, the phone's ping probably ensured they were afterwards. But the approach was designed to track how thoughts and emotions changed over time.
The same pattern emerged: spontaneous thoughts about a secret were linked with greater negative emotion, both in the moment and sometimes even hours later, but deliberate reflection carried much less emotional cost.
So if the study is to be believed, the real difficulty with secrets is not keeping them from other people. It is keeping them from yourself — just as Orwell suggested.