By Justine Benais The study that changed the game The University of Cambridge published a study that will likely be a big game changer in the field of mental health. Decades of psychological wisdom, stretching back to Freudian beliefs, have taught us that bottling up feelings of negative emotions is bad for a person’s mental health; as it can disrupt the normal function of your stress hormones called cortisol. In light of recent publications, this long standing dogma may no longer hold true as the study concluded that suppressing negative thoughts is actually good for mental health and a positive coping strategy. Researchers, like Cambridge Professor Michael Anderson, responded to the mental health crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic by working to find a way to help people better manage their COVID-realted stress. Anderson was particularly interested in applying a brain mechanism known as inhibitory control, which is the ability to override reflexive responses; such as the ‘Think/No Think’ procedure. His aim was to judge whether it could be applied to memory retrieval, which would in effect stop the retrieval of negative thoughts when confronted with potent reminders to them. Along with colleague Dr. Zulkayda Mamat, Anderson accomplished this by recruiting 120 people across 16 countries to test whether it might in fact be possible, and perhaps beneficial, for people to practice suppressing their fearful thoughts. Each volunteer was asked to think of a number of scenarios that might occur in their lives over the next two years. These included 20 negative fears and worries, 20 positive hopes and dreams, and 36 routine and mundane neutral events. Each event had to be specific to the participant and something they had vividly imagined occurring. They provided a cue word, which was an obvious reminder that could be used to evoke the event during training. Additionally, they offered up a key detail, a single word expressing a central event detail. Participants were asked to rate each event on a number of points: vividness, likelihood of occurrence, distance in the future, level of anxiety about the event or level of joy for positive events, frequency of thought, degree of current concern, long-term impact and emotional intensity. Some of the subjects were then put through a training session during which they were taught how to better block events. Three days later and again three months later, participants were once again asked to rate each event on vividness, level of anxiety and emotional intensity. They also completed questionnaires to assess changes in depression, anxiety, worry, effect and well-being. “It was very clear that those events that participants practiced suppressing were less vivid, less emotionally anxiety-inducing, than the other events and that overall, participants improved in terms of their mental health. But we saw the biggest effect among those participants who were given practice at suppressing fearful, rather than neutral, thoughts,” Mamat said. Suppressing thoughts even improved mental health amongst participants with likely post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Among these participants, their negative mental health indices scores fell on average by 16 percent, compared to a 5 percent decline for similar participants suppressing neutral events. The research team laid out its marker ultimately based on their results. “In general, people with worse mental health symptoms at the outset of the study improved more after suppression training, but only if they suppressed their fears,” they reported. “This finding directly contradicts the notion that suppression is a maladaptive coping process.” “What we found runs counter to the accepted narrative,” Anderson added. “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.” What other studies have to say Opposing research has maintained that people who habitually judge negative feelings as bad or inappropriate have more anxiety and depression symptoms and feel less satisfied with their lives than people who generally perceive their negative emotions in a positive or neutral light. This ultimately indicates that people fare better when they accept their unpleasant emotions as appropriate and healthy, rather than try to fight or suppress them.
Suppressed emotions don’t get a chance to be processed. But that doesn’t mean they simply disappear. Instead, they might show up as a range of psychological or physical symptoms. Psychotherapy has taught us that by dredging up these negative thoughts and memories, one can deal with them and rob them of their power. In more recent years, we’ve been told that suppressing thoughts is intrinsically ineffective and that it actually causes people to think about the thought more. The “don’t suppress” movement has become dogma in the clinical treatment realm, as proponents claim thought avoidance is a poor way to cope with anxiety, depression and PTSD. “Many of us have this implicit belief that emotions themselves are bad, they’re going to do something bad to us,” said the Cambridge study’s co-author Iris Mauss, a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Most of the time, however, “emotions don’t do harmful things,” she added; finding in another study she co-authored that it is actually the judgement of unpleasant feelings as bad or wrong that causes mental distress. So what can we take from all this? As with any psychological research, the results are nuanced and can not be applied as a general rule to all patients. It is the clinicians’ duty to distinguish when this process could be beneficial to a patient. In the case of people suffering from difficult symptoms such as PTSD, thought suppression could be very beneficial. However, for those who are trying to suppress thoughts about issues in their relationship, let’s say, thought suppression may cause more harm than good as that is a present problem that needs to be dealt with. While many decades of research oppose the recent Cambridge study, the fact that such differing results were able to be uncovered, is a step in a different era of psychological treatment. And it is the responsibility of researchers to continue this research to better elucidate which method is more effective in the treatment of mental health and in what cases it should be used. a
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May 2024
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