2023-09-22 14:41:25
The common belief that trying to suppress negative thoughts is bad for our mental health could be wrong. In fact, training people to eliminate negative thoughts can improve their mental health, says a study from the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom).
The research highlights that these results contradict the «centuries-old belief» according to which trying to get rid of harmful thoughts can have harmful effects on mental health.
Published in ‘Science Advances‘, the study analyzed 120 adults – some with severe depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress – from 16 countries who followed a three-day online training to suppress certain thoughts. After training, participants reported feeling less anxiety, negative emotions, and symptoms of depression.
“We are all familiar with the Freudian idea that if we suppress our feelings or thoughts, these thoughts remain in our unconscious, perniciously influencing our behavior and well-being,” says the professor. Michael Anderson.
«The goal of psychotherapy is to bring these thoughts to light so we can deal with them and steal their power. “In more recent years, we’ve been told that repressing thoughts is inherently ineffective and actually makes people think more about the thought – it’s the classic ‘Don’t think about a pink elephant’ idea.”
These ideas have become dogma in clinical treatment, says Anderson, and the guidelines speak of thought avoidance as an important maladaptive coping behavior that must be eliminated and overcome in depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. , For example.
When it appeared Covid-19 in 2020Like many researchers, Anderson wanted to see how her own research could be used to help people get through the pandemic. His interest was in a brain mechanism known as inhibitory control (the ability to override our reflective responses) and how it could apply to memory retrieval and, in particular, to stopping the retrieval of negative thoughts when faced with powerful reminders of them. .
Researcher Zulkayda Mamat believed that inhibitory control was essential to overcoming trauma in the experiences that happened to her and many other people she had encountered in life. She wanted to investigate whether this was an innate ability or something that is learned and therefore can be taught.
In the study, each participant was asked to think about a series of scenarios that could occur in their lives over the next two years: 20 negative ‘fears and worries’ that they feared might happen, 20 positive ‘hopes and dreams’, and 36 routine and mundane neutral events. The fears had to be worries that were currently troubling them, that had repeatedly intruded on their thoughts..
Each event had to be specific to them and something they had vividly imagined happening. For each scenario, they had to provide a key word (an obvious reminder that could be used to evoke the event during training) and a key detail (a single word that expressed a central detail of the event).
Participants were asked to rate each event on a series of points: intensity, probability of occurrence, distance in the future, level of anxiety about the event (or level of joy for positive events), frequency of thinking, degree of worry current, event duration. Impact term, and emotional intensity.
They also completed questionnaires to assess their mental health, although no one was excluded, allowing researchers to observe a wide range of participants, including many with severe depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress related to the pandemic.
After training – both immediately and after three months – participants reported that repressed events were less vivid and less frightening. Besides, They acknowledged thinking less about these events.
Thought suppression even improved mental health among participants with probable PTSD.
Overall, people with worse mental health symptoms at the start of the study improved more after suppression training, but only if they suppressed their fears. This finding directly contradicts the notion that suppression is a maladaptive coping process.
“What we found goes against the accepted narrative,” acknowledges Anderson, who adds that although more work will be needed to confirm the findings, “it seems that it is possible and could even be potentially beneficial to actively suppress our fearful thoughts.”
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