Researchers at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit trained 120 volunteers worldwide to suppress thoughts about negative events that worried them, and found that not only did these become less vivid, but that the participants’ mental health also improved.
“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 wellbeing perniciously,” said Professor Michael Anderson.
“The whole point of psychotherapy is to dredge up these thoughts so 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 the thought more – it’s the classic idea of ‘Don’t think about a pink elephant’.”
These ideas have become dogma in the clinical treatment realm, said Anderson, with national guidelines talking about thought avoidance as a major maladaptive coping behaviour to be eliminated and overcome in depression, anxiety, PTSD, for example.
When COVID-19 appeared in 2020, like many researchers, Professor Anderson wanted to see how his own research could be used to help people through the pandemic. His interest lay in a brain mechanism known as inhibitory control – the ability to override our reflexive responses – and how it might be applied to memory retrieval, and in particular to stopping the retrieval of negative thoughts when confronted with potent reminders to them.
Dr Zulkayda Mamat – at the time a PhD student in Professor Anderson’s lab and at Trinity College, Cambridge – believed that inhibitory control was critical in overcoming trauma in experiences occurring to herself and many others she has encountered in life. She had wanted to investigate whether this was an innate ability or something that was learnt – and hence could be taught.
Dr Mamat said: “Because of the pandemic, we were seeing a need in the community to help people cope with surging anxiety. There was already a mental health crisis, a hidden epidemic of mental health problems, and this was getting worse. So with that backdrop, we decided to see if we could help people cope better.”
Professor Anderson and Dr Mamat recruited 120 people across 16 countries to test whether it might in fact be possible – and beneficial – fo
