In this photo illustration, a teenager poses for a picture in Arlington, Virginia, June 11, 2021.
Mental health professionals have long believed that facing fears reduces depression and anxiety caused by negative thinking. However, new research suggests that suppressing negative thoughts may work better for certain people.
Researchers found that individuals who learned to control negative thoughts showed better recovery than those who had less severe mental health symptoms at the start of the trial.
Challenging Conventional Belief
The study's results, according to senior researcher Michael Anderson, a senior scientist at the University of Cambridge's MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, defy the conventional wisdom that ignoring upsetting thoughts eventually leads to unconscious influences on behavior, emotions, and motivations.
Anderson said, as quoted by US News & World Report, "This conflicts with a growing body of evidence from neuroscience and psychology that, in fact, people can and often do this kind of thing all the time with some success. All of the signs point to this being something that actually helps us down-regulate or reduce the memory of unpleasant thoughts."
Neurologist Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, theorized that "repression is a defense mechanism" and it is better to speak out negative thoughts than to conceal them, per NBC News.
Research from the late 1980s showed that telling people to stop thinking about a subject typically resulted in additional consideration about that subject. Because of this, some therapies encourage clients to reflect on and analyze challenging events rather than burying them.
Study co-author Zulkayda Mamat noted, as quoted by New Scientist: "When you avoid a thought by doing or thinking of something else, yes, you tend to attract that thought again. But we found that suppressing thoughts by making sure your mind is without any thought - for example by imagining a blank space or imagining pushing that thought out of your mind - can be beneficial."
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Some specialists maintain that suppression is still an unhealthy coping mechanism, despite these findings. The Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine's Scott Glassman, head of the Master of Applied Positive Psychology Program, stresses that teaching someone to put aside their fears or thoughts is insufficient since it does not tackle the underlying basic beliefs fueling those anxieties.
Intriguing Results
The investigation expands on Anderson's earlier investigations into inhibitory control-the capacity of the human brain to suppress automatic reactions. 120 participants from 16 different nations participated in the research and received three days of online thought-suppression training. Researchers presented the event names repeatedly while asking participants to block out ideas that could be connected to the 20 upsetting, 36 neutral, and 20 pleasant events that they were asked to report.
As a result, melancholy, anxiety, and worry decreased, according to the findings. Participants who kept using this tactic reported better mental health even three months later. Surprisingly, individuals who had more severe mental health problems at the beginning of the trial, such as depression, anxiety, or PTSD, saw the most improvements.
According to the research, suppressing negative thoughts may help manage mental and emotional issues without medications. Experts point out that it is not the same as denial and that it should be utilized consciously to face anxiety.
Although suppression seems promising in this study, previous research has connected it to higher cravings, rumination, and decreased mindfulness in those with drug misuse or depression. The research also discovered that, in contrast to repressing negative thoughts, visualizing optimistic outcomes had no discernible effect on mental health.
The British Medical Research Council and the Mind Science Foundation provided funding for the study, per Neuroscience News.
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