04Mar
Clearing the mind of anxious thoughts, rather than processing them, can sometimes be good for our mental health. This is evident from British research. In the late 1980s, scientists discovered something unexpected: People who were first asked not to think about white bears, and later asked to think about them, had more thoughts about white bears than people who were only asked to think about white bears. This led to the belief that blocking unwanted thoughts ironically makes them come back more often. As a result, some forms of therapy aim to improve mental health by recalling difficult experiences from memory and exploring them, rather than suppressing them. Now cognitive scientists Zulkayda Mamat and Michael Anderson from the University of Cambridge have discovered that some forms of thought suppression can actually be useful. They describe their results in the scientific journal Science Advances.
Empty space
“If you avoid a thought by doing something else or thinking about something else, yes, you tend to keep coming back to that thought,” says Mamat. “But we found that suppressing thoughts by making sure your mind is thought-free – for example by imagining an empty space, or imagining pushing that thought out of your mind – can be beneficial.”
The researchers recruited 120 subjects. They asked them to imagine future scenarios that could happen in their lives over the next two years. The participants were not asked whether they had been diagnosed with a mental illness, but the surveys they took did reveal some symptoms of one.
Negative scenarios
Each participant came up with 20 negative scenarios they were afraid of, such as losing a loved one, and 36 neutral scenarios, such as hanging out the laundry. For each scenario, participants had to provide a code word that could be used to evoke the thought.
In Zoom, Mamat and Anderson trained 61 of the participants to suppress negative thoughts and 59 of them to suppress neutral thoughts. They did this for 20 minutes a day for three days. During each training session, the researchers showed participants the code word to evoke a thought about a scenario. They then asked to block thoughts of the event. Then they presented a new code word.
Immediately after the last training session, 90 percent of people who suppressed fears reported that the imagined events had become less vivid in their minds. About 75 percent of those who suppressed neutral thoughts reported the same.
PTSD
Participants also self-reported the extent to which they had symptoms of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and anxiety, in pre- and post-training surveys. Among participants who scored high on PTSD symptoms before training, those who suppressed negative thoughts had a 16 percent decrease in the severity of their symptoms after training. Those who suppressed neutral thoughts saw a decrease of only 5 percent.
Even among people who reported symptoms of depression before the training, suppressing negative thoughts reduced their scores more than suppressing neutral symptoms.
The studies also found that people believed that suppressing negative thoughts, but not neutral thoughts, improved their well-being. The beneficial effects on mental health measurements persisted up to three months after training.
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