New research from the UK…What researchers got wrong about suppressing intrusive thoughts !
Tuesday, October 31, 2023. This is for DG…who I thought of immediately….
Thought suppression has been a human preoccupation for as long as humans have had thoughts…
For a long time, researchers have scolded us to avoid thought suppression, because it will fail to suppress the intrusive thoughts. But here’s a study that says.. wait a minute….
For decades, we’ve been told that learning to suppress thoughts was an exercise in futility. But a new study calls bullsh*t on the naysayers.
An intriguing new study suggests that learning how to corral and curb your stinkin’ thinkin’ could be good for your mental health.
This research lit up the internet because it directly refutes the orthodox view that thought suppression should be avoided in favor of other techniques to deal with unhealthy rumination.
The Boomerang Effect in thought suppression…
Suppressing thoughts has frequently been linked to the boomerang effect of a thought rebounding back with a whack to the side of the head.. In other words, trying suppress a thought tends to turbocharge it for the rebound!
Professor Michael Anderson, study co-author, explained:
“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 behavior 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 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.'”
How the study was conducted
For this study, researchers from the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit recruited 120 participants from 16 countries to take part in this research project. In some cases, social media sites were used.
The researchers collected data on their mental health, and the cohort included humans with both with a history, and a lack of history of mental health problems.
Here is what I found interesting. The researchers really asked these participants to think.
They were asked to list 20 negative “fears and worries” that could possibly occur over the next two years that were of top-of-mind to them now, as well as 20 positive “hopes and dreams.” The participants were also asked to compile a list of 36 neutral-outcome events.
They were then asked to give each a cue word. The purpose of this cue word was to remind them of the impending event, as well as an essential detail in the imagined scenario.
The study subjects then underwent 20 minutes of training in thought suppression via videoconferencing, during which participants were confronted with their cue word for 4 seconds.
Of the participants, 61 were in the “suppress-negative” group and asked to first imagine the event and then suppress any thoughts about it.
Meanwhile, 59 participants in the “suppress-neutral” group were asked to imagine the event vividly. The participants were asked to do this 12 times a day for three days.
What did they find?
The researchers then measured how well the thoughts had been remembered. They assessed the mental well-being of the participants after they underwent the training. They then followed up with the study subjects up to 90 days later, give or take..
Immediately after suppression training, the participants who were asked to suppress unwanted thoughts were found to recall the key detail of the event they had been concerned about less often and less vividly. This was not the case for all participants.
However, of the 61 participants who were asked to suppress unwanted thoughts, six reported increased vividness of the unwanted thought after training.
At the 90 day follow up, the researchers discovered that the humans who had been asked to suppress thoughts had lower vividness and memory of detail when thinking about the event they had been concerned about.
People with worse mental health symptoms at the start of the study were found to have a greater improvement in their mental health three months later, only if they had been asked to suppress thoughts!
Even more fascinating findings…
The mental health indices scores of humans with PTSD who suppressed these thoughts increased by almost 10%, compared to a 1% drop among those who didn’t.
I forgot to mention that these mental health indices included both negative impacts (the usual… anxiety, depression, fretful worry, etc.) and positive impacts (for example, a shift to a more positive outlook).
Here’s what’s really interesting, I like the cross-cultural effort to capture a diverse sample. For this research project, 120 people from 16 countries were taught to how to suppress different kinds of thoughts, among them, the negative ones that made them particularly anxious.
They did this by staring at a single word reminder of one of their negative recurring thoughts.
For example, someone who was fretful about being in a car accident might stare at the word ‘crash’. While looking at this word they practiced actively blocking any associations, be they thoughts or images.
They were not allowed to use any other ideas to distract themselves from the worrying thoughts and images in front of them. They were simply asked to just try to suppress them.
These humans practiced these exercises for three consecutive days and the researchers included neutral and positive stimuli for control and comparison.
The results revealed that immediately, and after three months, the suppressed thoughts were less frequent, less vivid and less fearful.
Dr. Zulkayda Mamat, the study’s first author, 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.”
The exercise was particularly beneficial among the humans who were in the cohort enduring post-traumatic stress disorder.
This group saw their mental health improve by 16%, on average, after practicing thought suppression. Not bad for what had been an utterly discredited approach to rumination.
Professor Anderson explained:
“What we found runs counter to the accepted narrative.
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.”
Here’s what kills me… LOL… follow-ups showed that the humans who kept practicing thought suppression were in the best mental health after just three months!
This is embarrassing.. WTF? How did we get thought suppression so wrong?
How did we get thought suppression so fu*king wrong?
In a nutshell, the work flow of the original studies, probably misunderstood how thought suppression occurs naturally.
In the original studies, humans were given a thought to monitor for, which they might or might not experience (for example imagine fishing on a lake, but with no fish in sight).
But in this new 2023 research study, the humans were actively trying to suppress the retrieval of an actual memory (to continue to mutilate the metaphor…imagine staring at a fish on a plate… and trying not to think about the fish).
It seems, then, that this type of tailored suppression of a specific thought in retrievable memory, while being actively reminded of it, is the key.
Wow. I can’t wait to take this to all my hurt partners. This is something every couples therapist should be aware of immediately.
I know I enjoy a modest readership in the community of practice of couples therapists.
To those gentle readers, please start helping clients suppress rumination with this brand spankin’ new, research-tested method, pronto! And tell me any results in the comments!
Be well, stay kind, and Godspeed.
RESEARCH:
Zulkayda Mamat, Michael C. Anderson ,Improving mental health by training the suppression of unwanted thoughts.Sci. Adv.9,eadh5292 (2023).DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adh5292
