
A longstanding core belief of mental health maintains that people must confront their fears to ease the anxiety and depression stemming from those negative thoughts. Now a new study argues that, for some people, suppressing negative thoughts and worries might be a more successful strategy. Mental health actually improved for some study participants after they underwent training to help them suppress their fears about negative events that might occur in the future, researchers report. What’s more, people with worse mental health symptoms at the start of the study experienced more improvement by the end if they learned to suppress their negative thoughts. The results run counter to arguments that thought suppression is a poor coping process because it’s inevitably unsuccessful, said senior researcher Michael Anderson. He is a senior scientist and program leader with the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. “For the better part of a century, starting with Freud, we’ve been told that when you do something like that — pushing distressing, fearful thoughts out of awareness — it comes back to bite you in the form of unconscious influences on your behavior, in your dreams and your emotions and motivations and moves,” Anderson explained. “This conflicts with a growing body of evidence from neuroscience and psychology that, in fact, people can and often… read on > read on >