Happy Halloween! I hope you get a lot of trick-or-treaters at your house, and that you aren’t THAT house giving away apples or pencils or any other joyless nonsense. For the sake of the kids, be a real-life hero: Give ‘em full-sized Snickers.

Halloween always provoked mixed feelings in Casa Brooks. Mrs. B, having grown up deprived of the holiday in Spain, always found it weird, distasteful, and pagan. When the boys wanted to go out as decapitated corpses or something delightful like that, she absolutely forbade it. Instead, she invariably tried to make them dress up like their Spanish forebears, which of course they hated.

Halloween, circa 2005. “I don’t want to be a bullfighter!” were the words next out of our son’s mouth. “You want caramelos, or not?” asked his mom, menacingly. In the end, he was a bullfighter.
The same son, all grown up and voluntarily dressed up as the Man in the Yellow Hat (an all-yellow jumpsuit? What a weirdo that character is, I now realize), to indulge his own son, dressed as Curious George. All is well.
Where all this comes from: Our young bullfighter’s mother at a very mature age 5, on the roof of the family’s Barcelona apartment building.

Whether you yourself are wearing a costume this year for Halloween, we all wear plenty of disguises in real life, don’t we? I know—very profound! Well, that’s my topic today.

In the appropriate contexts, masking your true self can be healthy and freeing. The German language has a special word for the happiness such customs bring: Maskenfreiheit—the freedom found behind a mask. The bliss of Maskenfreiheit can be literal; at Halloween parties, for example, hiding your face can be fun. But it can be metaphorically freeing as well: Think of the feeling you get when you are in a setting where you know absolutely no one; that’s a kind of mask itself, and it can be a good feeling.

But when masking is a permanent and central part of your work or life, something is seriously amiss. Researchers call this “emotional labor”—effort exerted just to maintain an acceptable demeanor, which often means suppressing our negative emotions. This has been found to lower well-being.1

Just as a surgical mask can’t be worn 24/7, our metaphorical masks must come off eventually. Here are three rules for doing so.

  1. Take a break from yourself. The energy required to maintain your identity is probably greater than you realize, and finding a way to relinquish it regularly can help you recharge. Engaging in hive activities, such as religion and group entertainment, is an easy way to take a vacation from yourself. The key is to release yourself from your own constraints. Or if you have more time and money on your hands, you might follow in the footsteps of the millionaire Malcolm Forbes, who at age 48 took up motorcycling around the country in relative anonymity.2 The key is to release yourself from your own constraints.
  2. Remove your mask around those you love the most. Your most important relationships—the ones in which you invest the lion’s share of your time and energy, whether they’re personal or professional—require you to be able to be yourself. If you are masked up 24 hours a day, something needs to change.
  3. Make sure you like what's behind your mask. As exhausting as keeping up the mask can be, letting it drop might be a terrifying prospect if you don’t especially like what it’s hiding. Maybe you are ashamed of carrying anger and hostility, or the sadness you keep bottled up inside. In cases like these, staying masked means missing out on an opportunity to face reality and make some positive changes. Research has shown that self-acceptance can lower anxiety and protect your mood in the face of setbacks—and isn’t associated with depression.3 You can even change personality traits you don’t like in yourself, but doing so requires honesty and conscious intervention.4‍

There’s much more to say about the masks we wear in everyday life, and how we can learn to be free of them. In fact, I’ve devoted this week’s episode of Office Hours to just that—you can listen here.

Olé, and see you next week,

Arthur

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References‍
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​[1] Cropanzano, R., Weiss, H. M., & Elias, S. M. (2003). The Impact of Display Rules and Emotional Labor on Psychological Well-Being at Work. Emotional and Physiological Processes and Positive Intervention Strategies.
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[2] Range, P. R. (1985, July 6). Man and his machine. The Washington Post.

[3] Chamberlain, J.M., Haaga, D.A.F. (2001). Unconditional Self-Acceptance and Psychological Health. Journal of Rational-Emotive & Cognitive-Behavior Therapy, 19, 163–176.

[4] Bleidorn, W., Hill, P. L., Back, M. D., Denissen, J. J. A., Hennecke, M., Hopwood, C. J., Jokela, M., Kandler, C., Lucas, R. E., Luhmann, M., Orth, U., Wagner, J., Wrzus, C., Zimmermann, J., & Roberts, B. (2019). The policy relevance of personality traits. American Psychologist, 74(9), 1056–1067.Kahneman, D. (2012). Thinking, fast and slow. Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology, 6(2), 253-256.