UK (Commonwealth Union) – A recent study conducted by scientists at the University of Cambridge challenges the prevailing notion that attempting to repress negative thoughts is detrimental to our mental well-being.
Researchers at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit globally trained 120 volunteers to suppress thoughts related to distressing events. The study’s surprising findings revealed that not only did these suppressed thoughts become less vivid, but they also contributed to an improvement in the participants’ mental health.
Professor Michael Anderson indicated that we are all acquainted with the Freudian concept that the suppression of our emotions or thoughts can result in these thoughts lingering in our subconscious, exerting a negative influence on our behavior and overall well-being.
He said, “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 concepts have solidified into established principles within the clinical treatment field, according to Professor Anderson. National guidelines often address thought avoidance as a significant maladaptive coping behavior that should be addressed and overcome, particularly in conditions like depression, anxiety, and PTSD.
In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, Professor Anderson, like many other researchers, sought ways to apply his research to assist people during this crisis. His focus honed in on a cognitive mechanism known as inhibitory control, which pertains to our capacity to override instinctive responses. Specifically, he explored how inhibitory control could be harnessed for memory retrieval, especially in the context of preventing the recall of negative thoughts when triggered by powerful reminders.
During this period, Dr. Zulkayda Mamat, a former PhD student in Professor Anderson’s lab and affiliated with Trinity College, Cambridge, was keen to investigate the role of inhibitory control in overcoming traumatic experiences—both in her own life and in the lives of others she had encountered. Her inquiry delved into whether this capacity was an inherent trait or a learned skill, with the potential for teaching and cultivation.
Dr Mamat says “Because of the pandemic, we were seeing a need in the community to help people cope with surging anxiety. There was already a mental health crisis, a hidden epidemic of mental health problems, and this was getting worse. So with that backdrop, we decided to see if we could help people cope better.”
Professor Anderson and Dr. Mamat conducted a study involving 120 participants from 16 different countries to investigate the possibility and potential benefits of practicing the suppression of fearful thoughts. Their research findings were published recently in Science Advances.
In this study, each participant was tasked with envisioning a set of scenarios that could reasonably unfold in their lives over the next two years. This set comprised 20 negative “fears and worries” that currently troubled them and had frequently invaded their thoughts, 20 positive “hopes and dreams,” and 36 ordinary and mundane neutral events. These fears had to be directly relevant and concerning to the participants, with a strong mental presence. For each scenario, participants were required to provide a cue word (a clear reminder to evoke the event during training) and a key detail (a single word capturing a pivotal aspect of the event).
The act of suppressing negative thoughts did not result in a “rebound” effect, wherein participants remembered these events more vividly. Among the 120 participants, only one individual exhibited heightened detail recall for suppressed items after the training. Furthermore, among the 61 participants who engaged in suppressing fearful thoughts, just six reported an increased vividness for non-suppressed items after the training. Notably, this increase was consistent with the baseline rate of vividness enhancement observed for events that were not suppressed at all.
