Alex Korb, a neuroscientist at UCLA, has conducted several experiments to study how the brain benefits when we express ourselves. During the experiments, in an FMRI study, the participants viewed pictures of people with different facial expressions conveying emotional states. Every time the participants viewed the pictures their amygdala reacted to the emotions in the picture. However, one of the most interesting finds in this study was that when a participant named the emotion he was seeing, the amygdala's reactivity decreased and lessened the impact of the emotion. The study even found that when we try to suppress our negative emotions, our inward stress and anxiety get more intense! That is why our dear Sigmund Freud used to say:
Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.