by After a breakup, you might think you’re doing fine until you pass that street corner or run into a mutual friend or hear a certain love song on the radio. No matter how much you’d like to stop thinking about that person, everything is a reminder of the relationship. Without erasing entire chunks of your memory, like Jim Carrey’s character in the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” is it possible to banish unwanted thoughts?
The short answer is: maybe. But whether it is appropriate to do so in the long run is more complicated.
People’s thoughts are far less focused — and under far less control — than most people realize, said Joshua Magee, a clinical psychologist and founder of Wellness Path Therapy, who has conducted research on unwanted thoughts, images and urges in mental disorders. In a famous 1996 study in the journal Cognitive intervention: Theories, methods, and findings (opens in new tab) by study author Eric Klinger, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Minnesota, participants tracked all of their thoughts for a day. On average, people reported more than 4,000 individual thoughts. And these thoughts were fleeting — lasting no more than five seconds each, on average.
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“Thoughts are constantly ebbing and flowing and many of us don’t notice,” Magee said. In the 1996 study, a third of these thoughts seemed to come completely out of nowhere. It’s normal to experience worrying thoughts, Magee added. In 1987 study (opens in new tab) conducted by Klinger and colleagues, people perceived 22% of their thoughts as strange, unacceptable, or wrong—for example, you might imagine yourself cutting your finger while cooking or dropping your baby as it transfer to their crib.
In some cases, it makes sense to suppress these unwanted thoughts. In an exam or a job interview, for example, you don’t want to feel distracted by the thought that you will fail. On a flight, you probably don’t want to think about the plane crashing. And there is evidence that it is possible to eliminate those thoughts, Magee said.
In a 2022 study in the journal PLOS Computational Biology (opens in new tab), a team of Israeli researchers showed 80 paid volunteers a series of slides showing different nouns. Each noun was repeated on five different slides. As they viewed the slides, participants noted a word they associated with each noun — for example, “road” in response to the word “car.” The researchers told one group that they would not be paid for words they repeated. Another group could repeat virtually as many as they wanted. With this method, the researchers tried to mimic what happens when someone hears that love song on the radio and desperately tries to think of anything but their ex-beau.
The results revealed that when participants saw each noun a second time, they took longer than the control group to find a new association—”tire” instead of “road,” for example—that suggests their first response came to mind. them before replacing it. Their responses were particularly delayed for words they first rated as “strongly associated” with the cue word. However, participants became faster each time they saw the same slide, indicating that their association between the cue word and their first response—the thought they were trying to avoid—weakened.
“We found no evidence that people can completely avoid unwanted thoughts,” study lead author Isaac Fradkin, who did the research as a psychologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told Live Science. But the results show that practice can help people become better at avoiding a particular thought, added Fradkin, who is now a fellow at Max Planck University College London’s Center for Computational Psychiatry and Research.
Not everyone agrees that a presentation of random words is a good way to tease out how people suppress emotionally charged thoughts, as Medical news today (opens in new tab) mentionted. And other research shows that avoiding thoughts can backfire. “When we suppress a thought, we send our brain a message,” Magee said. This effort characterizes thought as something to be feared. “In essence, we make these thoughts more powerful by trying to control them.” A 2020 analysis in the magazine Perspectives on Psychological Science (opens in new tab) of 31 different studies of thought suppression found that thought suppression works — in the short term. While participants tended to succeed in thought suppression tasks, the avoided thought appeared in their minds more often after work is over.
In the end, it may make more sense to approach those unwanted thoughts with caution and just wait for them to pass instead of avoiding them — just like the thousands of other thoughts that cross your mind every day, Fradkin said. “We can allow these thoughts to just be in our minds, not hold them too tightly and not try to fight them.”
