Repressing negative emotions and thoughts may not be harmful for mental health. Researchers affiliated with the UK’s University of Cambridge even suggest that doing so can improve mental health, as it makes certain preoccupations less vivid and all-consuming.
“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 behaviour and well-being perniciously,” professor Michael Anderson said in his introduction to the research.
“The whole point of psychotherapy is to dredge up these thoughts so one can deal with them and rob them of their power. We’ve been told that suppressing thoughts is intrinsically ineffective and that it actually causes people to think the thought more.”
Such beliefs, he said, have made addressing negative thoughts a behaviour to be observed in order to preserve one’s mental health.
However, given the deterioration in mental health during the pandemic, the researcher wanted to focus on a brain mechanism known as inhibitory control, which enables people to block out automatic thoughts or actions that are out of place in order to focus on carrying out a specific task.
Together with Dr Zulkayda Mamat, also affiliated with the University of Cambridge, he set out to determine whether it was possible to train people to suppress their negative thoughts.
No fewer than 120 participants were recruited from 16 countries, and then asked to think about various realistic and personal scenarios, including 20 fears and worries, 20 hopes and dreams, and 36 neutral events.
The participants were then asked to rate each scenario according to a number of criteria – including the associated level of anxiety or happiness, or frequency of thought and emotional intensity – and then self-assess their mental health via a questionnaire. This enabled the researchers to detect, for example, those suffering from depression or post-traumatic stress.
The final exercise was carried out by Zoom, where the participants received 20 minutes of training a day, for three days, to recognise and recall each scenario. They were taught to block associated images or thoughts for negative and neutral events, depending on the group, and imagine emotions felt in connection with other scenarios for positive or neutral events.
At the end of the experiment, they again evaluated each scenario according to the abovementioned criteria.
Published in the journal “Science Advances”, this work showed that the events the participants tried to ignore were less present in their thoughts and preoccupied them much less, whether immediately after the experiment or three months later.
Repressing these thoughts had a positive impact on the mental health of the participants, particularly those who were initially suffering from post-traumatic stress.
The researchers report that scores on negative mental health indices fell by an average of 16% in these participants.
“It was very clear that the events they practised suppressing were less vivid, less emotionally anxiety-provoking, than others; and that, overall, participants improved in terms of mental health,” Anderson said.
He concluded that what they learnt “runs counter to the accepted narrative” and, although more work will be needed to confirm the findings, it might be possible – even potentially beneficial – to actively suppress fearful thoughts.