How to Stop Unwanted Thoughts

Scientists asked people to avoid thinking of a white bear in a famous experiment in the 1980's. The subjects were told to ring a bell if a white bear came to mind. The bell was rung more than once per minute. When people were told to think of white bears, they came to think of them more often than a control group was told to think of them.

It was found that blocking out thoughts made it harder to keep them at bay. Many people thought the results supported the Freudian idea that repressed memories linger in the subconscious. Conventional wisdom says that thought suppression is harmful. Today's established forms of therapy offer an antidote to the dangers of quashing a memory by guiding patients to revisit and elaborate on difficult experiences.

There is research that shows people block memories using environmental reminders. Experiments from several academic groups show that memory suppression can be done adaptively and that it protects people against anxiety and depression. It might help cleanse the mind of intrusive memories in the aftermath of trauma. There is enough evidence for us to believe that there is an effect on memory. He says that people with post traumatic stress disorder have problems suppressing their feelings. I think it has some potential clinical utility.

Michael Anderson, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Oregon, came up with an alternative to the white bear test called the 'think/no-think' task. He and his student taught 32 college students to memorize 40 words. There was a cue for the first word. The researchers showed the students only the cue and told them to either think about it or not. The suppression made people forget. The more suppression trials the students engage in the worse their memory is for the words that came first.

Retrieval suppression is the suppression of memories elicited through associations with the environment. It shows how common it is for reminders of unwanted thoughts to be let in or pushed out. The white bear method requires people to think about a white bear when reminded of instructions. You are thinking about white bear because you are suppressing it. It may prime it for later recovery in a way that doesn't happen in "no-think" The think/no-think task allows suppression because people are not reminded of the memories they are trying to avoid.

Experts say that the white bear exercise may have an effect on a person's memory. Anderson says thatclinicians have overgeneralized. Retrieval suppression can be done in a very different manner.

The basis of this type of forgetting was discovered in the mid-2000s by Anderson and his team. The brain's prefrontal cortex is known as the engine of behavioral self-control. It was another decade before researchers learned that the effects on the hippocampus may persist for a small window of time, casting what Anderson calls an amnesic shadow. Anderson says that this degraded state is caused by suppression. More clues to the mechanism in the brain that allows people to suppress their thoughts have been found.

The brain's motor cortex is shut down instead of the hippocampus for action-based tasks according to a study. The pattern of brain activity associated with suppressing an action is similar to the pattern of brain activity associated with suppressing a thought, according to the researchers.

In a study published this year, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences showed that the process of physically disrupting memories is more effective than simply making them less accessible. Scientists taught 37 people to associate neutral clues with pictures of disasters, accidents or injuries and then had them suppress those associations. The researchers monitored the brain activity of the participants during the suppression task. The upsetting scenes were less vivid due to the suppression of memories. A computer analysis showed that the patterns of brain activity that were originally used to represent memories of those scenes were in many cases completely different. The less vividly a person remembers a scene the more distorted that recollection is in the brain.

It's counter to the idea that memories are hidden in the subconscious. One of the study's investigators says that the memory isn't there but that a person can't say it anymore The brain doesn't have the ability to support a vivid recollection.

Evidence shows that memory suppression is an important skill. The first support came in 2003 when Paula Hertel and her student showed that people with depression had trouble with memory suppression and that the bigger the deficit, the more they ruminate or experience unwanted thoughts. Hertel said that memory control problems could explain why people ruminate. Habitual changes can be hard to reverse. Hertel says that practicing makes perfect if you have been thinking about events from your past that bother you. Practice bringing it to mind is a great way to remember.

Scientists have replicated this research and extended it to other mental illnesses in the past. Anderson and his colleagues linked people's ability to suppress their thoughts to their resilience after they watched disturbing videos. People who could forget had less intrusive memories. A 2020 meta-analysis of 25 studies shows that people without mental health conditions can suppress unwanted memories. Better mental health is related to the ability to willfully forget. The suppression mechanism might protect us from developing these disorders.

Pierre Gagnepain, a cognitive neuroscientist at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research and his colleagues reported something similar in real trauma survivors. In the aftermath of the 2015 deadly terrorist attacks in and around Paris, Gagnepain's team put 102 of the attack's survivors along with 73 controls in a brain scanning device. 55 of the survivors had post traumatic stress disorder. The people who remained stress-free were better at suppressing memories than those with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. They showed that resilient survivors have more effective cognitive control mechanisms. The development of the traumatic memory may be affected by the disruption of the mechanisms used to prevent memories.

There are other ways to dim traumatic or upsetting memories. It's called memory reconsolidation. A person is prompted to recall a memory in order to make it vulnerable to changing circumstances. The person takes a drug to affect the memory. There have been attempts to give people propranolol, which is thought to block memory reconsolidation, with mixed results. Memory can be interfered with by behavior. In a 2020 trial, Emily and her colleagues tried to change the way people remember a film by having them play a game after seeing it. People experienced fewer intrusive memories after the procedure.

It is not known how to use memory suppression as therapy. Anderson suggests teaching people to practice it. Repeated trials improve the performance of participants on the think/no- think task. It is possible for individuals to stop their thoughts while looking at their own upsetting memories or fears.

It's not certain whether no-think training would work for people with significant deficits. According to Hertel, work-arounds are needed for depressed people, such as giving them a new thought to associate with the cue as a replacement for the troublesome one.

It is possible that sleep is another useful addition. A researcher at the University of York in England has found that sleep deprivation makes it harder for people to suppress memories. When people are deprived of sleep, they experience more intrusive memories than people who sleep. If you don't get enough sleep, you'll have more intrusive memories and you'll be more likely to develop mental health problems. The ability to sleep can be affected by more intrusive memories.

People are encouraged to come up with their own interpretations of difficult experiences. Reanalysis may be unnecessary according to research on suppression. Anderson says that it is possible to reduce the number of thoughts by simply stopping them.