Researchers have found that doing this not only reduced negative thoughts, but also improved the mental health of the study participants.
Suppressing negative thoughts can be good for your mental health, a new study has found.
These findings run counter to the commonly held view that ignoring thoughts means that they reside in our subconscious and influence our behavior.
Researchers from the University of Cambridge's Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit trained 120 volunteers from around the world to suppress thoughts about negative events that bothered them.
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They discovered that not only did it (depression) decrease, but the mental health of the study subjects also improved.
According to Professor Michael Anderson: 'We are all familiar with the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud's idea that if we repress our feelings or thoughts, they remain in our unconscious and have negative effects on our behavior.
He added: 'The sole purpose of psychotherapy is to eliminate these thoughts so that one can deal with them and take away their power.
‘"In recent years, we've been told that suppressing thoughts is fundamentally ineffective and actually makes people think, a classic illustration of 'get rid of the worry,'" he said.
When the coronavirus pandemic broke out in 2020, like many researchers, Professor Anderson wanted to see how his own research could be used to help people during the pandemic.
Dr Zalkida Mamat, a PhD student in Professor Anderson's laboratory and at Trinity College, Cambridge, said: 'We were seeing a need to address the growing anxiety in the community due to the Covid outbreak.
According to him: 'There was already a mental health crisis, there was a hidden epidemic of mental health problems, and it was getting worse.
So with that background we decided to see if we could help people deal with it better."
In the study, each person was asked to think of scenarios that could happen in the next two years of their lives - 20 negative fears and anxieties they dreaded and 20 positive hopes and dreams.
They had to provide a keyword and a description for the scenario.
Each event was rated on a number of points, salience, likelihood of occurrence, distance in the future, level of anxiety or happiness related to the event, frequency of thought, level of current concern, long-term effects and emotional intensity. was
Additionally, volunteers filled out questionnaires to evaluate their mental health.
Dr Mammat then gave each volunteer 20 minutes of training via Zoom, which consisted of 12 unimagined trials and 12 imagined ones, where they were asked to say a cue word. After being given they either think clearly, or stop thinking about an event.
At the end of the third day and three months later, the volunteers were asked again to rate the vividness, anxiety level and emotional intensity of each event.
According to the study, volunteers at both sites reported that repressed events were less vivid and less frightening. They found themselves thinking less about these events.
"The participants' overall mental health improved, and it was evident that the events in which they practiced suppression were less vivid and emotionally upsetting than the other events. I got better.
But we saw the greatest effect in participants who were trained to suppress fearful thoughts rather than neutral thoughts.
According to the findings, suppressing thoughts also improved the mental health of people who may be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Among post-traumatic stress sufferers who suppressed negative thoughts, their negative mental health scores decreased by an average of 16 percent, while their positive mental health scores increased by about 10 percent.
People who had more severe mental health issues at the beginning of the study generally made more progress after receiving suppression training, but only if they were able to control their fears.
The researchers also reported that one Raza was so impressed with the technique that she taught her daughter and her mother how to do it.
The findings, funded by the UK's Medical Research Council and the Mind Science Foundation, are published in the journal Science Advances.
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