Instead of dissecting and analysing your fearful thoughts, perhaps suppressing and ignoring them might work to make you feel better, according to a new study. — dpa
Contrary to popular belief, repressing negative emotions and thoughts is not harmful for our mental health.
Researchers affiliated with the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, even suggest that doing so can improve mental health, as it makes certain preoccupations less vivid and all-consuming.
“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 well-being perniciously.
“The whole point of psychotherapy is to dredge up these thoughts so one can deal with them and rob them of their power.
“In recent years, we’ve been told that suppressing thoughts is intrinsically ineffective and that it actually causes people to think the thought more” is how Professor Dr Michael Anderson introduced this research in a statement.
Such beliefs have made avoidance of negative thoughts a behaviour to be banished in order to preserve one’s mental health.
However, given the deterioration in mental health during the Covid-19 pandemic, he wanted to focus on a brain mechanism known as inhibitory control.
This mechanism enables us to block out automatic thoughts or actions that are out of place, in order to focus on carrying out a specific task.
Together with his colleague Dr Zulkayda Mamat, Prof Anderson set out to determine whether it was possible to train people to suppress their negative thoughts.
Around 120 participants were recruited from 16 countries.
They were asked to think about various realistic scenarios, including 20 fears and worries, 20 hopes and dreams, and 36 neutral events, which had to be personal and something they had realistically imagined.
Participants were then asked to rate each scenario according to a number of criteria, such as the associated level of anxiety or happiness, frequency of thought and emotional intensity.
They then self-assessed their mental health via a questionnaire, thus enabling the researchers to detect, for example, those suffering from depression or post-traumatic stress.
The final exercise was carried out online via Zoom.
This is where the participants received 20 minutes of training a day, for three days, to recognise and recall each scenario, blocking any associated images or thoughts (for negative and neutral events, depending on the group), and on the contrary, imagining emotions felt in connection with other scenarios (for positive or neutral events).
At the end of the experiment, they again evaluated each scenario according to the above-mentioned criteria.
Published in the journal Science Advances, this work showed that the events the participants tried to ignore were less present in their thoughts and preoccupied them much less, whether immediately after the experiment or three months later.
But the findings also reveal that repressing these thoughts had a positive impact on the mental health of the participants, particularly those who were initially suffering from post-traumatic stress.
The researchers report that scores on negative mental health indices fell by an average of 16% in these participants.
“It was very clear that those events that participants practised suppressing were less vivid, less emotionally anxiety-provoking, 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,” explains Dr Mamat.
Prof Anderson concludes: “What we found runs counter to the accepted narrative.
“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.” – AFP Relaxnews
