Suppressing negative thoughts improves mental health: Study

The commonlyheld belief that attempting to suppress negative thoughts is bad for our mental health could be wrong suggests a new studyScientists at the University of Cambridge trained 120 volunteers across 16 countries to suppress thoughts about negative events that worried them and found that not only did these become less vivid but that the participants mental health also improvedWere all familiar with the Freudian idea that if we suppress our feelings or thoughts then these thoughts remain in our unconscious influencing our behaviour and wellbeing perniciously said Professor Michael Anderson from the varsityrsquos Medical Research Council MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences UnitThe 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 weve been told that suppressing thoughts is intrinsically ineffective and that it actually causes people to think the thought more its the classic idea of Dont think about a pink elephant he saidThese ideas have become dogma in the clinical treatment realm said Anderson with national guidelines talking about thought avoidance as a major maladaptive coping behaviour to be eliminated and overcome in depression anxiety Posttraumatic stress disorder PTSD for exampleDr Zulkayda Mamat from Trinity College Cambridge believed that inhibitory control was critical in overcoming trauma in experiences occurring to herself and many others she has encountered in lifeShe had wanted to investigate whether this was an innate ability or something that was learnt and hence could be taughtBecause 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 Dr Mamat saidIn the study published in Science Advances each participant was asked to think of a number of scenarios that might plausibly occur in their lives over the next two years 20 negative fears and worries that they were afraid might happen 20 positive hopes and dreams and 36 routine and mundane neutral eventsThe fears had to be worries of current concern to them that have repeatedly intruded in their thoughts It was very clear that those events that participants practised suppressing were less vivid less emotionally anxietyinducing 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 Dr Mamat saidSuppressing thoughts even improved mental health among participants with likely posttraumatic stress disorderAmong participants with posttraumatic stress who suppressed negative thoughts their negative mental health indices scores fell on average by 16 per cent compared to a 5 per cent fall for similar participants suppressing neutral events whereas positive mental health indices scores increased by almost 10 per centIn general people with worse mental health symptoms at the outset of the study improved more after suppression training but only if they suppressed their fearsThis finding directly contradicts the notion that suppression is a maladaptive coping processWhat we found runs counter to the accepted narrative said Professor Anderson 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 thoughtsThis story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed agencies Midday accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability trustworthiness reliability and data of the text Midday managementmiddaycom reserves the sole right to alter delete or remove without notice the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever