With star athletes, Ryan asks, do we prefer perfect comportment, or authenticity? The answer might be complicated from a PR standpoint, but performance is another matter. While sulking or wallowing can hurt an athlete, experts say trying to suppress your emotions is even worse. “When we ignore our feelings, or suppress them, they only become stronger,” Marc Brackett the director of Yale University’s Center of Emotional Intelligence, writes in his best-seller Permission To Feel. “The really powerful emotions build up inside us, like a dark force that inevitably poisons everything we do, whether we like it or not.”