| Health / Health News |
Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all
Researchers at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit trained 120 volunteers worldwide to suppress thoughts about negative events that worried them, and found that not only did these become less vivid, but that the participants’ mental health also improved.
Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health. Photo: Rebe Pascual/Unsplash
“We’re all familiar with the Freudian idea that if we suppress our feelings or thoughts, then these thoughts remain in our unconscious, influencing our behaviour and wellbeing perniciously,” said Professor Michael Anderson.
“The whole point of psychotherapy is to dredge up these thoughts so one can deal with them and rob them of their power. In more recent years, we’ve been told that suppressing thoughts is intrinsically ineffective and that it actually causes people to think the thought more – it’s the classic idea of ‘Don’t think about a pink elephant’."
These ideas have become dogma in the clinical treatment realm, said Anderson, with national guidelines talking about thought avoidance as a major maladaptive coping behaviour to be eliminated and overcome in depression, anxiety, PTSD, for example.
When COVID-19 appeared in 2020, like many researchers, Professor Anderson wanted to see how his own research could be used to help people through the pandemic.
His interest lay in a brain mechanism known as inhibitory control – the ability to override our reflexive responses – and how it might be applied to memory retrieval, and in particular to stopping the retrieval of negative thoughts when confronted with potent reminders to them.
Dr Zulkayda Mamat believed that inhibitory control was critical in overcoming trauma in experiences occurring to herself and many others she has encountered in life. She had wanted to investigate whether this was an innate ability or something that was learnt – and hence could be taught.
Professor Anderson and Dr Mamat recruited 120 people across 16 countries to test whether it might in fact be possible – and beneficial – for people to practice suppressing their fearful thoughts.
In the study, each participant was asked to think of a number of scenarios that might plausibly occur in their lives over the next two years – 20 negative ‘fears and worries’ that they were afraid might happen, 20 positive ‘hopes and dreams’, and 36 routine and mundane neutral events.
The fears had to be worries of current concern to them, that have repeatedly intruded in their thoughts.
At the end of the third day and again three months later, participants were once again asked to rate each event on vividness, level of anxiety, emotional intensity, etc., and completed questionnaires to assess changes in depression, anxiety, worry, affect, and wellbeing, key facets of mental health.
Dr Mamat said: “It was very clear that those events that participants practiced suppressing were less vivid, less emotionally anxiety-inducing, than the other events and that overall, participants improved in terms of their mental health. But we saw the biggest effect among those participants who were given practice at suppressing fearful, rather than neutral, thoughts.”
Following training – both immediately and after three months – participants reported that suppressed events were less vivid and less fearful. They also found themselves thinking about these events less.
Suppressing thoughts even improved mental health amongst participants with likely post-traumatic stress disorder.
Among participants with post-traumatic stress who suppressed negative thoughts, their negative mental health indices scores fell on average by 16% (compared to a 5% fall for similar participants suppressing neutral events), whereas positive mental health indices scores increased by almost 10% (compared to a 1% fall in the second group).
In general, people with worse mental health symptoms at the outset 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 runs counter to the accepted narrative,” said Professor Anderson. “Although more work will be needed to confirm the findings, it seems like it is possible and could even be potentially beneficial to actively suppress our fearful thoughts.”
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