Encore: How living with secrets can harm you, with Michael Slepian, PhD

August 5, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

For psychologist Michael Slepian, the most surprising finding from a decade of research on secrecy came the night he gave his job talk at Columbia Business School. After presenting his data on how people describe secrets as heavy or burdensome, he got a call from his father, who told him he was not his biological father. Slepian’s parents had decided before he was born that they would never tell their children. The secret had weighed on them not because they had to hide it in conversation—that was rare—but because they had to live with it in their own minds. That personal experience crystallized the central claim of his research: the harm of secrecy comes less from concealing information from others than from ruminating on it alone.

What counts as a secret, and how common are they?

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What you'll learn

1 (00:58) **The Core Question: How Do Secrets Harm Us?** - Host Kim Mills introduces the episode’s central puzzle: if people keep 13 secrets on average, what is the psychological and physical cost of living with them?
2 (02:46) **The 13-Secret Finding** - Slepian explains the landmark study that first quantified how many secrets people keep and what they are.
3 (04:17) **Secret vs. Privacy: The Critical Distinction** - Slepian draws a clear line between a private matter and a genuine secret.
4 (05:03) **Lying vs. Keeping a Secret** - The conversation clarifies the relationship between lying and secrecy, using a movie example.
5 (06:00) **The Real Harm: Living With the Secret, Not Hiding It** - Slepian presents his core insight: the burden comes from rumination, not from the act of concealment.
6 (06:56) **Shame vs. Guilt: Which Hurts More?** - Slepian distinguishes the emotional flavors of secrets and their impact on well-being.
7 (07:47) **The Link to Physical and Mental Health** - The guest explains the tricky evidence connecting secrecy to actual health outcomes.

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Show Notes

We all keep secrets—on average, people have about 13 secrets at any one time, five of which they have never told another person. Psychologist Michael Slepian, PhD, of Columbia Business School, talks about what types of secrets people keep, why keeping a secret bottled up inside can harm us, how keeping secrets—or sharing them—affects people’s relationships with each other, how we decide whom we can trust with our secrets, and whether other people can tell when we’re holding something back.

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