Make your brain a recycle bin this way

Make your brain a recycle bin this way

Some suffer from the inability to avoid some painful memories or bad thoughts, such as the inability to avoid remembering a life partner after a breakup when crossing a street corner or hearing the melody of a song with a specific memory, or the person encounters strange, unacceptable or wrong thoughts, for example For example, imagining himself cutting his finger while cooking or having his child fall to the ground while being carried to bed.

Live Science asked a question about whether it is possible to keep unwanted thoughts out of mind? The short and quick answer is an avoidable yes. But whether it is advisable to do this in the long term is more complicated.

fleeting thoughts

Joshua Magee, a clinical psychologist who has done research on unwanted thoughts and images and induce mental disorders, said people's thoughts are much less focused, and much less out of control, than many imagine. In one famous study, published in 1996 in the journal Cognitive Interference: Theories, Methods, and Findings by Eric Klinger, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Minnesota, participants tracked all their thoughts over the course of one day. On average, participants reported more than 4000 individual thoughts, which were mostly fleeting thoughts, meaning none lasted more than five seconds, on average.

strange ideas

“Ideas are constantly ebbing and flowing, and many of us don’t even notice,” Maggie said. In a 1996 study, a third of these ideas appeared to have come completely out of nowhere. It's normal to have disturbing thoughts, Maggie added. In a study conducted by Klinger and colleagues in 1987, participants saw 22% of their thoughts as strange, unacceptable, or wrong—for example, a person could imagine cutting their finger while cooking or a child falling while carrying them to bed.

In some situations, it makes sense to suppress these unwanted thoughts. In an exam or job interview, for example, one does not want to be distracted by the thought that they will fail. On a flight, he probably doesn't want to think about the plane crash. Maggie said there is evidence that it is possible to eliminate these thoughts.

In a 2022 study published in PLOS Computational Biology, results showed that 80 participants followed a series of slides displaying different names. Each name was repeated in five different slides. While watching the slides, the participants wrote down a word they associated with each name, for example, the word “road” was written in conjunction with the word “car”. The researchers sought to simulate what happens when someone hears an emotional song on the radio and desperately tries to think of anything other than their ex-partner.

The results revealed that when participants saw each name a second time, they took longer than the control group to come up with a new association, such as “a frame” rather than a “road,” for example, indicating that their first response popped up in their mind before it took its place. . Their responses are particularly late to the words they rated as "strongly related" to the keyword the first time around. But participants were faster each time they viewed the same slide, indicating a weaker association between the keyword and their first response, a link that mimics the idea they were trying to avoid.

The researchers said there was no evidence "that a person can completely avoid unwanted thoughts". But the results suggest that practice can help people get better at avoiding a particular thought.

Backfire

Not everyone agrees that a slideshow of random words is a good way to elicit how some suppress emotion-laden thoughts, Medical News Today reported. Other research suggests that avoiding thoughts can be counterproductive. “When we suppress an idea, we send our brains a message,” Maggie said. This effort describes thought as something to be feared, and “in essence, we make these thoughts more powerful by trying to control them.”

short term effect

A meta-analysis of 31 different studies on thought suppression, published in Perspectives on Psychological Science in 2020, finds that thought suppression yields short-term outcomes and impact. While the participants tended to be successful in the thought-suppression tasks, the avoided thought popped into their heads more often after the task ended.

In the end, experts are of the opinion that it might make sense to take a vigilant approach to unwanted thoughts and simply wait for them to pass rather than try to avoid them, just as with the thousands of other thoughts that roam every human's head every day. These thoughts are to be present only in the mind, without trying to suppress and forget them too hard, because they get more space in this case.