- The belief that confronting unwanted thoughts will help a person process them better and that suppressing them is maladaptive has existed since Sigmund Freud.
- However, research from the past two decades has suggested that learning to avoid certain unwanted thoughts could improve a person’s well-being.
- A recent study has shown that training people to avoid unwanted thoughts can actually improve their mental well-being and reduce depression for up to three months afterward.
Can suppressing unwanted thoughts ever be a good thing? And do humans actually have to process every thought from the negative events they experience?
New research now indicates that, despite popular belief, it may be beneficial to suppress some unwanted thoughts, which could help improve mental health.
A recent study showed mental health could be improved for up to three months after online training to suppress unwanted thoughts.
The findings are published in Science Advances.
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 their trial, some via social media sites. They collected data on their mental health, and the cohort included participants both with a history and no history of mental health problems.
Participants were asked to list 20 negative “fears and worries” that could feasibly happen over the next two years that were of current concern to them, as well as 20 positive “hopes and dreams,” and 36 neutral events. They were then asked to give each a cue word that reminded them of the event and a key detail in the imagined scenario.
They 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…
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