summary: New research challenges traditional beliefs about suppressing negative thoughts and mental health. Researchers trained participants to suppress their fears and worries and observed that these thoughts became clearer and participants’ mental health improved.
Contrary to common clinical belief, suppressing fearful thoughts did not intensify the recurrence of the fear. Remarkably, participants who practiced thought suppression techniques beyond the study continued to experience benefits for their mental health.
Important facts:
- A University of Cambridge study found that suppressing fearful thoughts reduced their clarity and improved participants’ mental health.
- The results showed no significant “rebound” effect. The repressed negative thoughts never returned with increased intensity.
- The mental health benefits of thought suppression were most pronounced among participants who continued to practice outside of the research framework.
sauce: cambridge university
The commonly held belief that trying to suppress negative thoughts is bad for your mental health may be wrong, new research from scientists at the University of Cambridge suggests.
Researchers from the Medical Research Council’s (MRC) Department of Cognitive and Brain Sciences trained 120 volunteers around the world to suppress thoughts about anxious negative events. In addition to being less vivid, participants’ mental health was also found to improve.
“We are all familiar with Freud’s idea that when we suppress our emotions and thoughts, they remain in our unconscious and have a negative impact on our behavior and health,” Professor Michael Anderson said. To tell.
“The whole point of psychotherapy is to get rid of these thoughts, to deal with them, to take away their power. In recent years, suppressing thoughts is essentially ineffective, and in fact people have found that It is said that you will be able to hold it. more – It’s the classic idea of “don’t think about pink elephants.”
According to Professor Anderson, these ideas are well-established in the field of clinical treatment, and national guidelines state that thought avoidance is a major maladaptive coping that must be eliminated and overcome in, for example, depression, anxiety, and PTSD. It is said that it is an action.
When the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) emerged in 2020, Professor Anderson, like many researchers, wanted to know how his research could be used to help people through the pandemic. I thought. He is interested in a brain mechanism known as inhibitory control, our ability to override our knee-jerk reactions, and how it affects memory recall, especially when faced with powerful reminders of negative thoughts. It was about how it can be applied to stopping recall.
Dr. Zulqaida Mamat (then a PhD student in Professor Anderson’s lab and Trinity College, Cambridge) believed that in order to overcome the trauma of experiences that had happened to herself and many others she had encountered in her life, inhibitory control was needed. believed that it was important. She wanted to investigate whether this was an innate ability or a learned ability and therefore could be taught.
Dr Mamat said: “The pandemic has shown us the need to support people in their communities to cope with the surge in anxiety. There is already a mental health crisis, a hidden epidemic of mental health problems, and the situation is It was getting worse. So we decided to see if we could help people cope better.”
Professor Anderson and Dr Mamat gathered 120 people from 16 countries to test whether it was actually possible and beneficial for people to practice suppressing their fearful thoughts. Their discovery today scientific progress.
In this study, each participant was asked to think of several possible scenarios that could occur in their life over the next two years. 20 negative “fears and worries” that you feared might occur, 20 positive “hopes and dreams,” and 36 neutral everyday events. That fear must be a current concern for them and one that has repeatedly entered their thoughts.
Each event must be unique to them and something they vividly imagined happening. For each scenario, we were to provide a cue word (an obvious reminder that could be used to evoke that event during training) and a key detail (a single word detailing the central event). . for example:
- Negative – I visited my parents in the hospital due to the new coronavirus infection, the cue was “hospital” and the details were “breathing”.
- Neutral – a visit to the optician. The queue is ‘Optician’ and the details are ‘Cambridge’.
- Positive – When you see your sister getting married, the cue is “wedding” and the details are “dress.”
Participants were asked to rate each event in several ways: vividness, likelihood of occurrence, future distance, level of anxiety about the event (or level of joy for positive events), and frequency of thoughts. , degree of current concern, length-period impact and intensity of emotion.
Participants also completed a questionnaire to assess mental health, but no one was excluded, so the researchers found that participants with severe depression, anxiety, or pandemic-related post-traumatic stress We were able to survey a wide range of participants, including a large number of participants.
Dr. Mamat then led each participant through a 20-minute training via Zoom. In this training, every day for three days, for each event he repeated 12 “No Imagine” and he repeated 12 “Imagine”.
In the no-imagine trial, participants were given one of the cue words and asked to first mentally acknowledge the event. They were then asked to stop thinking about the event while continuing to look directly at the reminder cue. Rather than imagining the event itself or using distracting thoughts to distract yourself, you should rather imagine the event itself and block out distracting images and thoughts. It may evoke memories. During this part of the test, one group of participants was given a negative event to suppress, and the other group was given a neutral event.
In the imagination trial, participants were given a cue word and asked to imagine the event as vividly as possible, think about what it would be like, and imagine how they would feel at the event. . For ethical reasons, participants were not asked to imagine negative events, only positive or neutral events.
At the end of the third day and again three months later, participants were asked to rate each event’s vividness, level of anxiety, intensity of emotions, etc., and were asked to rate each event’s vividness, level of anxiety, intensity of emotions, etc. I completed a questionnaire for evaluation. Happiness is an important aspect of mental health.
Dr. Mamat said, “These events that the participants had practiced suppressing were less graphic than other events, caused less emotional anxiety, and overall were better for the participants’ mental health.” It was clear that they had improved.” However, we saw the greatest effects in participants who were trained to suppress fearful thoughts rather than neutral ones. ”
Both immediately after training and three months later, participants reported that suppressed events became less graphic and less frightening. They also found themselves thinking less about these events.
Suppressing thoughts also improved the mental health of participants who were more likely to have post-traumatic stress disorder. Participants with post-traumatic stress who suppressed negative thoughts had negative mental health index scores lower by an average of 16% (compared to 5% for similar participants who suppressed neutral events). % decrease), and positive mental health index scores increased by almost 10%. (In the second group he decreased by 1%).
In general, people whose mental health symptoms were worse at the start of the study improved further after suppression training, but only if they suppressed their fear. This finding directly contradicts the notion that repression is a maladaptive coping process.
Suppressing negative thoughts did not result in a “rebound” in which participants recalled these events more vividly. Only 1 out of 120 participants who suppressed fear showed better recall of suppressed items after training, and only 6 out of 61 fear suppressed participants showed better recall of non-imaginative items after training. They reported an improvement, which was consistent with their baseline rate of clarity. Increase caused by events that were not suppressed at all.
“What we found goes against the accepted narrative,” Professor Anderson said. “Although further research is needed to confirm the findings, it appears that actively suppressing our fearful thoughts is possible and may even be potentially beneficial.”
Although participants were not asked to continue practicing this technique, many participants spontaneously chose to continue practicing. When Dr Mamat contacted his participants three months later, the effects in terms of lower levels of depression and negative emotions continued for all participants, but in daily life. We found that it was most pronounced among participants who continued to use this technique.
“Follow-up time was my favorite part of the entire doctoral program because I just enjoyed every day,” she said. “Not one participant said, ‘I feel bad,’ or ‘It was a waste.’ I didn’t question them or ask, ‘Did this help?’ They automatically told me how helpful it was. ”
One participant was so impressed with the technique that she taught her daughter and her own mother how to do it. Another person reported that she felt very isolated during the pandemic because she moved into her home just before COVID-19.
“She said this study came at exactly the time she needed it because she was having all sorts of negative thoughts and worries and anxieties about the future. And this really, really helped her. ,” Dr Mamat said. “My heart literally melted and I felt goosebumps all over my body. I told her, ‘If other people don’t like this experiment, I don’t care, Because I thought about how beneficial this experiment would be to you!”
Funding: This research was funded by the UK Medical Research Council and the Mind Science Foundation.
About this mental health research news
author: sarah collins
sauce: cambridge university
contact: Sarah Collins – University of Cambridge
image: Image credited to Neuroscience News
Original research: Open access.
“Improve your mental health by training yourself to suppress unnecessary thoughts” by Michael Anderson et al. scientific progress
abstract
Improve your mental health by training yourself to suppress unnecessary thoughts
Anxiety, post-traumatic stress, and depression have increased significantly around the world during the COVID-19 pandemic.
People with these symptoms experience distressing intrusive thoughts, but traditional treatments advise against suppressing them because the strength and frequency of the intrusions can backfire and worsen the disorder. This is often the case. In contrast, we hypothesized that training thought suppression would improve mental health.
120 adults from 16 countries received a three-day online training to suppress fear and neutral thoughts. No paradoxical increase in fear occurred. Rather, repression reduced the memory of the repressed fear, making the fear less vivid and causing anxiety.
After the training, participants reported reduced anxiety, negative emotions, and depression, with the latter effects lasting three months later. Participants with high trait anxiety and pandemic-related post-traumatic stress had the greatest and most durable mental health benefits.
These findings challenge the centuries-old conventional wisdom that suppressing thoughts is maladaptive and provide an accessible approach to improving mental health.