For years, psychologists have argued that suppressing thoughts can often backfire, sometimes even making them more persistent and intrusive. Nevertheless, recent research challenges this notion, and suggests that suppressing negative thoughts might actually be helpful for mental health.

A recent study, published within the journal Science Advances and led by Dr. Michael Anderson and Dr. Zulkayda Mamat, indicated that training the brain to dam out negative thoughts could improve symptoms of hysteria, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The study found that participants, who had high anxiety levels and had suppressed their negative thoughts, saw a 44% decrease in self-reported worries. Meanwhile, participants with PTSD saw their overall negative mental health symptoms decrease by 16%, while positive mental health increased by nearly 10%.

The study involved 120 participants from 16 countries, each tasked with listing 20 fears about potential future events, 20 hopes, and 36 neutral events. These fears weren’t generic, but recurring, distressing thoughts.

The participants also accomplished questionnaires to evaluate their mental health, allowing the researchers to watch the impact of the study on a broad range of participants with various conditions, including many with serious depression, anxiety, and PTSD.

The participants were asked to associate a cue word (an obvious reminder that could possibly be used to evoke the event during training) and a key detail (a single word expressing a central occurrence) with each form of event. For instance, the word “hospital” was related to the fear of fogeys getting severely sick from COVID-19 and the detail was “respiratory.”

Each event needed to be unique to the participant, and something they’d vividly imagined happening. The participants were asked to evaluate and rate each event on several aspects, including how vivid it was, the likelihood of its occurrence, when it would occur, the way it made them feel (anxious for negative events or joyful for positive ones), how often they considered it, degree of current concern, its long-term impact, and the way emotional intense it was for them.

Half of the participants were instructed to concentrate on one in all the negative words, without fascinated with the others. The opposite half did the identical, but with neutral words. The exercise was repeated 12 times day by day for 3 days.

“You are told: If something does pop into mind, even briefly, push it out,” Dr. Anderson, a cognitive neuroscientist on the University of Cambridge, said. “Furthermore, don’t distract yourself. Don’t take into consideration lunch.”

At the tip of the study, each immediately and after three months, participants reported suppressed events were less vivid and fewer fearful. In addition they found themselves fascinated with these events less.

Furthermore, the participants of the group that blocked out negative thoughts not only reported experiencing less vivid fears, but in addition improved mental health compared to the group which suppressed neutral thoughts.

“It was very clear that those events that participants practiced suppressing were less vivid, less emotionally anxiety-inducing, than the opposite events and that overall, participants improved by way of their mental health. But we saw the most important effect amongst those participants who got practice at suppressing fearful, quite than neutral, thoughts,” said Dr. Mamat, who was a PhD student in Anderson’s lab and at Trinity College, Cambridge, throughout the study.

“The individuals with the best trait anxiety and the best PTSD were those that benefited probably the most,” said Dr. Anderson.

He further noted that no instances of increases in negative symptoms were attributable to this intervention.

Moreover, suppressing negative thoughts looked as if it would prevent participants’ mental health from worsening over time, with roughly 80% of participants selecting to voluntarily proceed using the thought suppression techniques post-study of their day by day lives.

Dr. Anderson believes that training the brain to dam negative thoughts could possibly be a helpful tool in treating anxiety, depression, and PTSD, each in therapy and at home.

“Although more work will probably be needed to substantiate the findings, it looks like it is feasible and will even be potentially helpful to actively suppress our fearful thoughts,” he added.

Published by Medicaldaily.com