Suppressing negative thoughts might improve mental health, contrary to popular belief

Don't think about a pink elephant for the next minute.

Could you do it? Most likely not — that pink elephant was probably on your mind. Psychologists have long used this example to illustrate that suppressing a thought only makes it more intrusive. By the same logic, suppressing fears or anxieties is widely believed to negatively impact one's mental health.

"Part of the goal of psychotherapy is to figure out what you’ve repressed and bring it back and deal with it and then you’ll be better," said Michael Anderson, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge.

But Anderson's research newly demonstrates that suppressing negative thoughts may in fact improve symptoms of anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

His study, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, did/showed TK summary that's a little more specific to the study findings.

The research involved 120 adults from 16 countries, who were each asked to list 20 fears about things that might happen in the future.

"The fears couldn’t be generic, like ‘I’m worried that aliens are going to land on Earth.’ They’re things that are going through your mind recurrently that cause distress," Anderson said.

The participants also listed 36 neutral events, such a visit to the eye doctor. Next, they came up with a word that reminded them of each negative event. For instance, if a person was afraid of their parents getting severely sick with Covid, the word might be "hospital."

Half of the participants *confused by this - were there a series of experiments with different-sized groups as part of this larger study? like, they all came up with a word then the next steps differed?, people had to stare at their word for a few seconds without letting their minds wander into more distressing thoughts.

"You’re told: If something does pop into mind, even briefly, push it out," Anderson said. "Moreover, don’t distract yourself. Don’t think about lunch."

The exercise was repeated 12 times per day for three days. At the end of the experiment, participants said their negative thoughts were less vivid and their mental health had improved compared to another group that had been asked to suppress neutral thoughts, such as thinking about a visit to the eye doctor. The results held true three months after the experiment ended.

Among people with high levels of anxiety, their worries declined by 44%. And among people with post-traumatic stress, their overall negative mental health (measured by self-reported anxiety, depression and worry) fell by an average of 16%, while their positive mental health scores (self-reported well-being and positive mood) increased by nearly 10%.

What’s more, suppressing negative thoughts seemed to reduce the likelihood of participants’ mental health issues getting worse over time. The risk of depression becoming more severe, for instance, fell by 57% after the three-day experiment.

“The people with the highest trait anxiety and the highest PTSD were the ones that benefited the most," Anderson said. "There were no instances, actually, of increases in negative symptoms as a result of this intervention.”

Three months after the experiment was over, around 80% of participants said they had continued to the thought suppression techniques they learned in the study to control their fears. Anderson said the researchers looked for evidence that people’s fears were bouncing back or becoming more intense, but didn’t find any sign of that.

He thinks training the brain to block out negative thoughts associated with a future event may be an important tool for treating anxiety, depression and PTSD, both in therapy offices and at home.

“Once you teach people what they need to do, I think that they can do it on their own," he said.

However, Jan Wessel, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Iowa, said it’s too soon to recommend this approach to people with mental health issues.

"I don't think any individual study of a scale like this should lead to an immediate clinical application," he said. "But I think it's very, very encouraging."

Talking over fears may still have some benefit

Sigmund Freud, considered the founder of psychoanalysis, first introduced the idea that people should talk through their negative thoughts rather than suppressing them.

“Freud said repression is a defense mechanism. It makes you feel better in the moment, but you’re just shoving stuff down into the unconscious and it’s going to come back and influence you indirectly," Anderson said.

Starting in the late 1980s, Harvard social psychologist Daniel Wegner popularized the theory that trying to avoid a thought often backfires by making that thought more pervasive.

But Wessel said those theories aren't well supported by scientific studies.

"From a basic science perspective, some of these assumptions of psychoanalysis have probably not stood the test of time to the degree that you would want," he said.

Instead, Wessel said, there's evidence that people can train their minds to shut off certain harmful thinking patterns.

"Think about a baseball player learning how to check their swings better. They can really hone their perceptual and cognitive system to get really, really good at stopping themselves from executing an action. We believe that similar mechanisms are probably involved in in the suppression of things like intrusive thoughts," he said.

However, Wessel noted that some people benefit from the opposite approach: In controlled settings, exposing people with phobias or PTSD to the object or activity that they fear can help reduce that fear, research suggests.

Anderson said his new research should not be taken to mean that nobody benefits from talking through their negative thoughts.

"I certainly don’t think that there’s anything wrong with processing significant things in our lives," he said. "But for the majority of negative thoughts that we have, I’m not sure that recipe fits the bill."