Shillong, September 21: A new study challenges the common belief that suppressing negative thoughts is detrimental to mental health.
Scientists at the University of Cambridge conducted research involving 120 volunteers from 16 countries and discovered that suppressing thoughts about worrisome negative events not only made these thoughts less vivid but also led to an improvement in participants’ mental well-being.
Professor Michael Anderson from the university’s Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit remarked, “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.”
Traditionally, therapy aims to bring these suppressed thoughts to the surface to address and diminish their influence. However, recent thinking suggested that suppressing thoughts is ineffective and may even cause people to dwell on them more.
Dr. Zulkayda Mamat of Trinity College, Cambridge, wanted to explore whether inhibitory control, the ability to suppress thoughts, could be learned and taught as a coping mechanism, particularly in the context of rising anxiety levels during the pandemic.
In the study, participants were asked to think about various scenarios they believed could occur in their lives over the next two years. This included 20 negative “fears and worries,” 20 positive “hopes and dreams,” and 36 routine neutral events.
The study found that participants who practiced suppressing fearful thoughts experienced less vivid and emotionally distressing responses to those thoughts, leading to overall improvements in their mental health. This effect was most pronounced among participants who suppressed fearful thoughts rather than neutral ones.
Interestingly, even participants with likely post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) saw a significant improvement in mental health when suppressing negative thoughts. Their negative mental health scores dropped by an average of 16%, compared to a 5% decrease for those suppressing neutral thoughts. Additionally, positive mental health scores increased by almost 10%.
These findings contradict the belief that thought suppression is a maladaptive coping strategy. Professor Anderson concluded, “What we found runs counter to the accepted narrative. 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 thoughts.”