To stop yourself from doing or saying something; to suppress emotions or actions.
To stop yourself from showing or expressing a feeling, or to prevent yourself from doing or saying something. When you hold back, you keep something under control rather than letting it out freely.
Type
Separable
Collocations
hold back tears — try not to cry
hold back information — withhold facts deliberately
hold someone back — prevent someone from progressing
⚠️ Watch out
Can be reflexive ('hold yourself back') or transitive with a direct object ('hold back the tears') — don't confuse it with 'hold on', which usually means to wait.
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On the night of April 3, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered what would become his final public speech at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee. He was exhausted, ill, and had nearly skipped the event altogether. Standing before {{striking|adjective|medium}} sanitation workers — men who had endured violent intimidation for weeks — King spoke about threats on his life and said, with {{startling|adjective|hard}} calm, that he had 'been to the mountaintop' and was no longer afraid to die. Aides present that night later recalled that King {{wept|verb-various-tenses|hard}} backstage after the speech, overcome by the weight of what he sensed was coming. He did not hold back those {{private|adjective|easy}} tears, {{though|connective|medium}} for months he had held back his deeper fears from the public platform, {{projecting|verb-various-tenses|medium}} strength so that others would not lose courage. He was {{assassinated|verb-various-tenses|easy}} the following evening. {{Yet|connective|easy}}, the episode reveals something true about {{hold back|phrasal-verb|medium}}: sometimes what we suppress in front of others costs us greatly in private.
To restrain or hesitate means to suppress or hold in check an emotional reaction, preventing yourself from expressing what you genuinely feel in a given moment. It describes the conscious effort to keep emotions — such as tears, anger, or excitement — from surfacing outwardly.
Type
Transitive verb (restrain) / intransitive verb (hesitate) — used here as a paired expression describing emotional suppression
Collocations
restrain yourself — used reflexively to describe conscious self-control
restrain an emotion / reaction — direct object construction, common in neutral writing
hesitate before responding — describes a pause linked to suppressed feeling
stuggle to restrain — collocates naturally with difficulty or effort
restrain oneself from — followed by a gerund, e.g. 'restrain oneself from crying'
⚠️ Watch out
Note that 'restrain' works best with a reflexive pronoun (restrain yourself, restrain himself) when describing personal emotional suppression — omitting it can make the sentence feel incomplete or ambiguous. 'Hesitate' alone does not carry the full meaning of emotional suppression, so use it carefully in paired or supported constructions.
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Daniel had rehearsed the speech a dozen times. He knew the words, knew the rhythm, knew exactly where to pause. What he hadn't prepared for was seeing his mother sitting in the front row, watching him with that quiet pride in her eyes.
He had to restrain himself almost immediately. A tightness rose in his chest at the third sentence, and he took a slow breath to push it back down. The audience didn't notice.
Afterward, a colleague asked if he'd been nervous. Daniel smiled and said not really — which was true, in a way. He hadn't been nervous. He'd simply spent fifteen minutes restraining something much larger than nerves. He was glad he had. But walking to the car afterward, he finally let it go.
The Quiet Art of Keeping It Together
There's a particular kind of strength that rarely gets talked about — the kind that shows up not in bold action, but in a moment of stillness. The steady breath before answering a difficult question. The pause before speaking when your voice threatens to betray you. The ability to restrain an emotional reaction not out of coldness, but out of a genuine desire to stay present and functional in a situation that demands it.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, after watching a close friend deliver a eulogy at her father's funeral. She stood at the lectern for nearly eight minutes, composed and articulate, speaking about a man she had loved fiercely. I knew what it cost her. She told me later that the hardest part wasn't the grief itself — it was the moment midway through when she had to restrain the wave of it that rose without warning, pulling her focus from the words she needed to say.
"I just kept breathing," she said. "One sentence at a time."
There's nothing dishonest about that kind of restraint. It isn't repression, and it isn't performance. It's simply choosing the moment — deciding that the feeling is real and valid, but that right now, this particular space belongs to something else.
In professional contexts, 'withhold / suppress' means to consciously restrain or conceal an emotional reaction — such as frustration, disappointment, or anger — in order to maintain composure and professionalism in the workplace.
Type
Transitive verb (both 'withhold' and 'suppress' function as transitive verbs requiring a direct object)
Collocations
suppress a reaction — used when describing the control of an immediate emotional response
withhold an emotional response — formal phrasing common in HR and management writing
suppress frustration — natural collocation in performance and feedback contexts
withhold criticism — used when deliberately choosing not to voice negative feedback
suppress concern — often appears in reports describing professional restraint under pressure
⚠️ Watch out
Be cautious with 'withhold' in particular, as it can imply deliberate concealment with negative intent — for example, 'withhold information' carries a sense of bad faith. When describing emotional restraint in a neutral or positive light, 'suppress' is often the safer choice in professional writing.
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Marcus had been in back-to-back meetings all morning when the news arrived: the project he had led for eighteen months had been cancelled without consultation. Sitting at the head of the conference table, he felt the weight of it immediately. But with six junior colleagues watching, he knew this was not the moment. He suppressed the reaction entirely, thanked the director for the update, and steered the conversation toward next steps. Later, alone in his office, he wrote a careful email to HR, noting that team members had also been asked to withhold their responses publicly and would benefit from a proper debrief. He pressed send, then allowed himself, finally, to exhale.
The quarterly review had been tense from the opening slide. Figures were down, two key clients had not renewed, and the room was thick with the kind of silence that precedes difficult conversations. Around the table, eight directors sat with their presentations and their carefully arranged expressions. It was the kind of meeting where everyone had learned, over years of professional experience, to suppress the instinct to react visibly — where a raised eyebrow or a sharp intake of breath could be read as weakness, or worse, as an accusation.
Clara, the newly appointed Chief Operating Officer, had been in enough of these rooms to know the signs. She could see the tension in people's shoulders, the slight pause before each answer, the over-controlled calm that told her nothing honest was being said. She made a note to herself: the culture of expecting people to withhold authentic responses during performance reviews was no longer serving the organisation. If they were going to course-correct before the year's end, they needed honest voices in the room — not managed ones.
She closed her notebook, looked around the table, and asked a question no one had expected: 'What is it that none of us have said yet?'
In academic English, 'inhibit' or 'repress' means to prevent an individual, process, or system from developing, advancing, or reaching its full potential. These verbs are used to describe forces — psychological, social, institutional, or biological — that constrain or obstruct progress.
Type
Transitive verb
Collocations
inhibit development — used to describe forces that prevent growth or advancement in individuals or systems
inhibit progress — commonly paired with discussions of barriers in educational or institutional contexts
repress intellectual agency — used in critical or sociological discourse to describe systemic suppression of independent thought
repress emotional expression — frequent in psychological and affective learning literature
inhibit engagement — describes reduced participation or interaction as a consequence of constraining forces
⚠️ Watch out
Writers should be careful not to use 'repress' interchangeably with 'suppress' in all contexts, as 'repress' in psychological literature often carries the specific Freudian connotation of unconscious exclusion from awareness — this distinction matters in psychologically oriented academic writing. Additionally, both 'inhibit' and 'repress' are formal transitive verbs and should always take a direct object; using them without one (e.g. 'trauma can inhibit') sounds incomplete in academic prose.
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Dr Osei had spent three years advising the university's widening participation committee, and the same issue kept surfacing in the data. Emotional barriers — shame, chronic self-doubt, a persistent sense of not belonging — were inhibiting students from accessing the very support structures designed for them. They qualified academically. They arrived. And then something invisible seemed to repress their forward momentum, particularly in the transition from the first to the second year. Dr Osei presented these findings at the faculty development day, arguing that surface interventions were not enough. To truly support these students, the institution needed to understand what was inhibiting them at the level of identity, not just ability.
In contemporary educational psychology, the question of why intellectually capable students fail to progress at the rate their abilities might predict has generated a substantial and nuanced body of scholarship. Early explanations tended to focus on cognitive deficits — gaps in prior knowledge, underdeveloped study strategies, or limited engagement with feedback mechanisms. More recent theoretical frameworks, however, have shifted attention toward the affective dimensions of learning, recognising that emotionally laden self-perceptions play a critical role in shaping academic trajectories. Among the most significant of these is the phenomenon of internalised inadequacy: a persistent, often pre-consciously held belief that one does not genuinely belong within a given intellectual community. Research consistently demonstrates that this belief can inhibit students from taking the kinds of interpretive and argumentative risks that are fundamental to deep disciplinary learning. Rather than engaging boldly with contested ideas or positioning themselves as legitimate contributors to scholarly conversation, affected students adopt a posture of cautious minimalism — reproducing received wisdom, avoiding original claims, and retreating from intellectual visibility. Crucially, these patterns are not simply products of individual psychology; they are shaped and sustained by institutional cultures that, whether intentionally or otherwise, repress authentic intellectual self-expression among those who already perceive themselves as marginal. Addressing this requires intervention at both the pedagogical and structural levels.