Don’t hide your negative ideas; instead, bring them to the surface and negate their influence

Well, a research suggests that the idea that attempting to suppress unfavorable thoughts is bad for our mental health may not be accurate.

120 individuals from 16 different countries were instructed to suppress their thoughts about upsetting traumatic events by University of Cambridge researchers. They observed that doing so not only reduced the intensity of the subjects’ negative thoughts, but also enhanced their mental well-being.

“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,” says Professor Michael Anderson of the university’s Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit.

The whole point of psychotherapy is to bring up these concepts so that they may be addressed and de-powered. In more recent years, we have been informed that keeping ideas hidden is intrinsically counterproductive and actually encourages people to think about the notion more, like in the proverb “Don’t think about a pink elephant,” he said.

These theories, according to Anderson, have become clinical treatment dogma, with national recommendations citing thought avoidance as a significant maladaptive coping mechanism that should be avoided and overcome in conditions like depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), among others.

Dr. Zulkayda Mamat of Trinity College, Cambridge, claims that inhibition control is crucial for recovering trauma in both her own life experiences and those of many other individuals.

If this was an inherent gift or a learned skill that could be taught, she was curious to know.

We saw a need in the neighborhood to assist residents in handling their growing fear as a result of the outbreak. There was already a hidden pandemic of mental illness, and it was only getting worse. We decided to investigate whether we might help individuals cope better in light of this, according to Dr. Mamat.

Each participant in the research, which was reported in Science Advances, was asked to think about several situations that may conceivably take place in their life during the next two years. These scenarios contained 36 common and unremarkable neutral occurrences, 20 positive “hopes and dreams,” and 20 negative “fears and worries” that participants were fearful may occur.

 

The worries needed to be ones that bothered them right now and regularly crossed their minds. It was plainly clear that the instances that the participants practiced concealing were less vivid and more tense than the other experiences, and that overall, their mental health had improved. However, Dr. Mamat found that the individuals who focused on suppressing anxious thoughts rather than neutral ones benefited the most.