2023-09-24 12:00:00
Don’t think about a pink elephant. Don’t think about its trunk, or its legs that rest on the ground like pillars supporting a huge, heavy pink body. The mere fact that an object or an action is named to us is enough to activate a series of processes in our mind that They lead us to think about it. This not only happens with imaginary objects, but also with actions, such as thinking about breathing.
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Do not think about me. Pink Elephant.
After a while, or after a distraction, the object or action disappears from our thoughts. Now, once we have created the pink elephant, it can return at some point if the necessary stimuli are given. Fortunately, a pink elephant is not an inherently bad thoughtit may even be fun to imagine a pachyderm with such a peculiar color, but there are traumatic memories that may not be so pleasant keep them in your head.
Memories and subconscious
In psychology there is a certain consensus that repressing memories has negative effects. As it was thought, trying to repress a memory ends up causing the opposite effect. If we return for a moment to the pink elephant, when we are told not to think about that elephant, we inevitably end up thinking about it. Now, where the missteps of science begin and we delve knee-deep into swampy terrain is when you start talking about subconscious.
That is to say, that pink elephant, right now, even if we are not thinking about it, is in our mind, conditioning our behavior. This Freudian idea has also made its way into society and has long been one of the bases of psychotherapy. The idea behind this method is that to heal the mind it is necessary to revive memories to confront them. That is, we have to revive the pink elephant, embrace it, and live with it in a healthy way.
But does this work?
The answer to this question is extremely complex. Traumatic memories can cause changes in both behavior and brain biochemistry at levels that we do not fully understand. Currently, the therapies that experimentally demonstrate the most effectiveness in healing the mind are cognitive-behavioral therapies. These therapies are based on modifying the person’s behaviors with a series of exercises to understand harmful thoughts or actions and transform them into healthy habits. However, sometimes pharmacological help is also needed for the therapy to be effective.
As practically everything in our body, the mind can be trained. To give an example, we can observe the sport of chess. There are people who will have a greater innate ability to decipher the best moves on a chess board. Now, if that person has never played, he will have nothing to do against a person with lesser ability but who has been playing competitively for 10 years. This training and learning applies to all situations in our lives, and, therefore, it could focus on training to be happier.
inhibitory control
The Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit of the United Kingdom Medical Research Council has decided to experimentally test whether inhibitory control mechanisms can be used to improve mental health. This control is defined as the ability to stop doing an automatic action to replace it with a rational one. This action can be a thought, a behavior or an emotion, but whatever it is, the person does not want to do it anymore.
Dr. Zulkayda Mamat proposed during her doctorate that inhibitory control can be trained. Therefore, she devised an experiment that she put into practice during the COVID19 confinement. In this context, population anxiety levels increased significantly, so the doctor tried to find a method to learn to deal with those hard times. To do this, they recruited 120 people from 16 countries and, with the data collected, tried to conclude whether it was beneficial for mental health to practice suppressing harmful thoughts.
Training to be happier
In the study, they asked participants to think about situations that might occur in their lives in the next two years. Among the situations there had to be 20 fears or worries, 20 hopes or dreams, and 36 routine events. Each one had total freedom to choose their situations, but there was one rule: The fears or worries had to be from that moment and had to have occurred to them on more than one occasion.
Once the situations were chosen, they had to name them with a single word, something that they could unequivocally associate with the memory. They also had to write a detail. As an example of a negative thought; The situation would be visiting the parents in the hospital as a result of COVID-19, the keyword could be “Hospital” and the specific detail “Respiration”.
Once the volunteers had identified the situations, 3 20-minute sessions were scheduled on different days. In the sessions, they were shown a total of 12 key words related to fears and 12 to hopes. After this, they were asked to try to avoid imagining the event while looking at the fear word, but without being distracted, otherwise actively trying to block the memory. As a control, a group of volunteers were given the words for everyday situations instead of fears.
When shown the hope words, participants were asked to Imagine the situation as vividly as possible. In addition, participants had to comment on their feelings about it. To analyze changes in mental health, questionnaires were carried out before and after training, as well as a control after 3 months to observe long-term effects.
But did this work?
Study volunteers reported that anxiety-provoking events became much less vivid and they were less on their minds after training. In general this training increased the happiness of volunteers, but especially within a group that had reported suffering some type of post-traumatic stress. In them, training the suppression of the memory of the traumatic event helped them not to be affected by their daily lives and, above all, a “rebound effect” was not observed.
Both Dr. Mamat and her supervisor find this fact encouraging, because shows the benefits of training thought suppression. They also ask for caution until more studies are done, since 120 people may seem like a lot, but each person’s head may require a specific therapy. Therefore it is very important Go to a professional who assesses each person’s needs before starting a specific therapy.
However, the results are very interesting, and They provide a solid foundation to build more studies in this regard. In the end, it may be that, with enough training, suppressing those painful memories is beneficial and, instead of facing them, we can forget them until they no longer affect us. For now, and Because of this article, we will continue thinking about that pink elephant, with its trunk and legs that rest on the ground like pillars.
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