The phrase people reach for is getting something off your chest. It carries a whole theory inside it: that a secret is heavy because holding it in takes effort, and that saying it out loud sets the effort down.
For decades that was roughly the scientific theory too.
Then somebody measured it.
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That secrets do their damage in private rather than in the moments of concealing them is something we have covered before. What that work leaves open is the obvious next question, and it is the one a person actually carrying something wants answered: does telling anyone help, and if so, how?
What confiding actually changed
In 2019, Michael Slepian and Edythe Moulton-Tetlock at Columbia published four studies in Social Psychological and Personality Science under the title “Confiding Secrets and Well-Being”. Each study recruited 200 participants on Mechanical Turk and walked them through a list of common categories of secret, so that people reported not one secret but all the ones they were currently holding. Pooled across the four, that came to more than 800 participants and over 10,000 secrets, analyzed with multilevel models that treated both the participant and the category of secret as random factors, so no single person and no single kind of secret drives the result.
The headline finding is a null one. Confiding a secret did not predict concealing it any less. People who had told someone were not, by their own report, doing less of the work of steering conversations away from the subject.
What confiding did predict was wellbeing, by a different route. To the extent that confiding brought social support, people felt more capable of coping with the secret, and it is that sense of coping efficacy that tracked higher wellbeing. The same route tracked less frequent mind wandering back to the secret.
This matters because it cuts against the model the field had been using. The older account, associated with Pennebaker and with Lane and Wegner, held that secrets harm because active inhibition is difficult, stressful work, and that confiding helps by reducing how much inhibiting a person has to do. Slepian and Moulton-Tetlock name that model and report data that does not support it.
Telling is not the same act as confiding
The sharpest result in the paper is a contrast inside its second study, and it turns on a distinction that the everyday word telling hides.
Confiding, in this research, means disclosing something and asking the other person to hold it. It is disclosure plus a request for discretion. Slepian and Kirby had argued that people confide secrets mainly as a request for help, which makes it a different act from self-disclosure, an act of intimacy, and from emotional expression, which is often venting.
Study 2 set the two side by side. Confiding a secret was associated with thinking about it less often afterward. Disclosing the same kinds of information, with no mention that it was or should be kept private, was associated with thinking about it more.
The proposed explanation is that the things people keep secret are kept secret for fear of rejection, so disclosing them without any request for discretion leaves a person wondering how far the information will now travel. Confiding pairs the disclosure with a request that it stop there, and with a request for help.
What is actually being carried
A second, unconnected research group went at the other half of the question. If telling someone relieves a burden, what is the burden made of?
In “How Much Is It Weighing on You?”, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2024 and online the year before, Alisa Bedrov and Shelly Gable at the University of California, Santa Barbara pointed out that despite everything written about the weight of secrets there was no standardized way to measure it, and that most research had concentrated on the private, cognitive side while leaving the social and relational side alone.
So they built a scale. Across two pilot studies with 871 people, then an exploratory factor analysis with 299 participants and a confirmatory one with 352, secrecy burden resolved into four distinguishable components: daily personal impact, relationship impact, the pull to reveal, and anticipated consequences. Each was uniquely associated with different emotional and wellbeing outcomes.
A third study followed people over time. Higher scores on each of the four factors predicted lower authenticity and higher depression and anxiety two to three weeks later. That follow-up sample was 159 people, and it deliberately excluded everyone who had revealed their secret between the two surveys, so it describes those who went on keeping it.
The split matters for the practical question. If burden is four things rather than one, then confiding might plausibly move one of them, the daily private impact, and leave anticipated consequences exactly where they were. Neither paper has tested that.
What this evidence cannot do
Three of the four studies in the Columbia paper are correlational. People who had confided reported feeling more capable of coping, which is not the same as confiding having made them so. The fourth is experimental, but what it manipulates is how much attention people pay to support they had already received, not whether they confide at all.
The researchers are candid about why. Real, consequential secrets cannot ethically be assigned to people.
Nobody can be randomly allocated to have an affair.
The field therefore works by changing how people think about secrets they already have, and that limits every conclusion it can reach.
Both papers rest entirely on self-report, and both drew participants from online panels, Mechanical Turk in one case and Prolific in the other. The version of the confiding paper read for this article is the accepted manuscript posted by its authors, which the authors note has not had final copyediting, and which contains no limitations section at all.
None of this is clinical guidance. Depression and anxiety appear here as measured outcomes in a scale-validation study, not as something a reader should diagnose in themselves, and a secret that is making someone genuinely unwell is worth raising with a doctor rather than weighing against a factor analysis.
Where this leaves the phrase
Getting something off your chest turns out to be the wrong mechanism, whatever it is as a figure of speech. Nothing is set down. The secret is still there and, by these measures, still being concealed about as often as before.
What changes is narrower. Whether the person carrying it feels able to handle it, and how often their mind returns to it when nobody else is in the room. On the evidence so far, that shift depends less on the telling than on what comes back.