After a breakup, you may think you’re fine until you walk across a street corner, run into a mutual friend, or hear a certain love song on the radio. No matter how much you want to stop thinking about that person, everything is a reminder of the relationship. Once again, the question of whether it is possible to get rid of unwanted thoughts is questioned, apart from erasing all parts of your memory, like Jim Carrey’s character in the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”
If we answer this question briefly, we can say that maybe it is possible, but whether it is advisable for the long term is a more complex question.
Joshua Magee, a clinical psychologist who conducts research on unwanted thoughts, images and impulses in mental disorders and founder of Wellness Path Therapy, said that people’s thoughts are much less focused and much less in control than most people imagine. In a famous study published in 1996 in the journal Cognitive Interference: Theories, Methods, and Findings by study author Eric Klinger, an honorary psychology professor at the University of Minnesota, participants recorded all their thoughts for a day. On average, people reported more than 4,000 individual thoughts. And these thoughts were of very short duration. On average, they lasted no more than five seconds each.
“Thoughts come and go all the time, and most of us don’t realize it,” says Magee. In a 1996 study, one-third of these thoughts arose out of nowhere. Magee thinks it’s normal to have disturbing thoughts. In a 1987 study by Klinger and colleagues, people perceived 22% of their thoughts as strange, unacceptable, or wrong. These included imagining that you cut your finger while cooking or dropped it while carrying your baby in the crib.
Does it make sense to suppress unwanted thoughts?
In some cases, it makes sense to suppress these unwanted thoughts. For example, during an exam or job interview, you don’t want to be distracted by the thought of failing. When you’re on a plane, you probably don’t want to think about the plane crashing. Magee claims there is evidence that it is possible to suppress these thoughts.
In a 2022 study in the journal PLOS Computational Biology, a team of Israeli researchers showed 80 paid volunteers a series of slides showing different words. Each word was repeated on five different slides. While viewing the slides, participants noted down a word they associated with each word (for example, “road” in response to “car”). The researchers told one group that they would not be paid for the words they repeated. Another group would be able to repeat the words as many times as they wanted. With this method, the researchers tried to imitate what happens in the case of someone desperately trying to think of anything but their ex when they hear the love song playing on the radio.
The results showed that the participants took longer than the control group to find a new association (such as “tire” instead of “road”) when they saw each name a second time. This made me think that their first response was the first thing that came to their minds before they consciously made the decision to change it. Their responses were even more delayed, especially for words they rated as “strongly associated” with the cue word for the first time. However, participants acted faster each time they viewed the same slide, suggesting that the association between the cue word and their initial reaction (the thought they were trying to avoid) weakened.
“We found no evidence that people can avoid unwanted thoughts altogether,” study lead author Isaac Fradkin, who is a psychologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told Live Science. “But the results show that the practice can help people get better at avoiding a certain thought,” added Fradkin, who is now a faculty member at the Center for Computational Psychiatry and Aging Research at Max Planck University College London.
As Medical News Today reports, not everyone agrees that a slide show of random words is a good way to understand how people suppress emotional thoughts. And other research suggests that avoiding thoughts can backfire. “When we suppress a thought, we send a message to our brain,” Magee said. “This effort labels the thought as something to be feared. Basically, we make these thoughts stronger by trying to control them.”
A 2020 analysis of 31 different studies on thought suppression in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science says thought suppression works in the short term. While participants tended to be successful in thought suppression tasks, the avoided thought came to their minds more frequently after the task was finished.
Consequently, instead of approaching these unwanted thoughts with caution and avoiding them, as Fradkin says, it might make more sense to wait for them to pass, like the thousands of thoughts that run through your head every day: “We can just let these thoughts happen in our minds, without clinging to them too tightly and without trying to fight them…”
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