For years, psychologists have argued that suppressing thoughts can often backfire, sometimes even making them more persistent and intrusive. However, recent research challenges this notion, and suggests that suppressing negative thoughts might actually be beneficial for mental health.
A recent study, published in the journal Science Advances and led by Dr. Michael Anderson and Dr. Zulkayda Mamat, indicated that training the brain to block out negative thoughts could improve symptoms of anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
The study found that participants, who had high anxiety levels and had suppressed their negative thoughts, saw a 44% decrease in self-reported worries. Meanwhile, participants with PTSD saw their overall negative mental health symptoms decrease by 16%, while positive mental health increased by nearly 10%.
The study involved 120 participants from 16 countries, each tasked with listing 20 fears about potential future events, 20 hopes, and 36 neutral events. These fears were not generic, but recurring, distressing thoughts.
The participants also completed questionnaires to assess their mental health, allowing the researchers to observe the impact of the study on a broad range of participants with varying conditions, including many with serious depression, anxiety, and PTSD.
The participants were asked to associate a cue word (an obvious reminder that could be used to evoke the event during training) and a key detail (a single word expressing a central occurrence) with each type of event. For example, the word “hospital” was associated with the fear of parents getting severely sick from COVID-19 and the detail was “breathing.”
Each event had to be unique to the participant, and something they had vividly imagined happening. The participants were asked to assess and rate each event on several factors, including how vivid it was, the likelihood of its occurrence, when it might happen, how it made them feel (anxious for negative…
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