Gossip Is Good News For Your Health, Study

Keeping secrets could exert physical and emotional damage, according to a new study. It is like carrying physical weight that can rob you of your energy, according to hindustantimes.

"Being preoccupied by a secret at work can be demotivating," said Michael Slepian, assistant professor of negotiations at Columbia Business School, New York City and co-author of the study.

"The burden of secrecy can make things around you appear more challenging and if you're less motivated to tackle these challenges, your performance can suffer," Slepian noted.

A secret can preoccupy your mind and the more you think about it, the more you tend to waste your "personal, intellectual and motivational resources", Daily Mail reported.

After studying human conversations, biologists found that about 60% of gossiping is all about relationships and personal experiences, according to chealth.

Scientists assessed a number of experiments that could show the impact that secrets had on a subject's skill to judge the "steepness of a hill".

Most men are the first to reveal secrets, unlike what is normally thought. Social media has now helped them, so that they do not even have to wait to see their gossip partners in the pub in order to share a secret.

Almost half the men interviewed admitted that they would give forward the information within minutes of being told about it, while women will keep secrets for at least three and a half hours before they report it to their friends.

"This is the same kind of outcome we see when people are carrying physical burdens, seeing the world as more challenging, forbidding and extreme," Slepian pointed out.

Studies from the Anthropology Department at the University of Wisconsin and the State University of New York at Binghamton shows that gossip can be "life's informal handbook on how to behave" and clarifies some "unwritten rules" within groups, full of information that is never available anywhere else. It does make everyone, especially newcomers, feel part of the group that they join, according to nbcnews.