Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all

Others might be more meaningful, perhaps a character flaw that you don't want to think about, but without really processing it it will never get fixed and keep causing more problems.

The problem is that you can't "weed" your mind, that's not how minds really work. It's not a garden at all, it's a learning system. The things you pay attention to are also the things which become more prominent. Attention is ultimately sunlight and water for memories if we need to use a gardening analogy.

The problem really comes when the memory becomes intrusive. At that point you're forced to do something to tackle it because it's growing anyway.

I guess the whole point, and better way of putting the original idea is to resolve the negative thoughts. If the thoughts are trivial, just suppressing them is mostly resolution enough, since trivial thoughts are most probably not going to come back.

If the underlying reason for the negative thought is major and has staying power due to reality (e.g. you lost your mother when you were young), I think it's probable that the thought pattern is not going to go away if the reality underneath is not resolved (e.g. to actually learn to cope with your loss).

Because eventually, reality will force you to confront these things at some point, because it's, well, reality. If you just keep suppressing these negative thoughts, they will just keep coming back and you're not really winning that much.

The least time you spend on them the better, nothing good comes from dwelling.

I can't understand people that want to re-live or push through some negative thoughts "because it'll get better eventually". To me it seems like you're just making yourself numb, and it's got to be at the expense or something. You become so beaten down from them they don't hurt you anymore. I'd rather just not think about bad stuff, they come my away and I go away from them and I get to keep my "mental innocence". Why go through a long road when there's an immediate escape hatch?

Said in a similar way, I could prepare for bad things to come. I know my parents will die. Should I think about that non-stop and feel sad everyday I do it just so I'll feel less sad when they die? Sounds ridiculous.

I have zero desire to "understand" why some thoughts come sometimes, I just want to move past them as fast as possible.

Anyways, I agree completely. Life long struggle with anxiety and depression. Most of my issues come from ignoring my worst feelings and not dealing with them. I find the idea of suppressing feelings to be bizarre for treating clinical issues. Maybe that’s why mindfulness only ever provided me temporary relief.

Have to disagree. A weapon is for fighting, and as Siddhartha Gautama said: "What you fight becomes stronger." They are tools IMHO that can help you, if you invest time and effort.

And I'm not talking about those weird ideas about autism, that anybody with a brain who worked with autistic children or adults would know to dismiss, or that dumb dream analysis, I'm talking about clinical psychoanalysis and it's 'practical' application. The fact is, solving bipolarity or schizophrenia with psychoanalysis is like solving cancer with homeopathy, except in the second case the practionners have a smudge of ethics and led their patient towards real medical praticiens once the issue is to big for them.

Whereas psychanalyst try to extract the most money they can for 15 years, pass the patients between themselves to make the con last longer, and if they're lucky the patient miss their TS, go see a real doctor that in 5 (5!) minutes diagnose bipolarity, then in a day make a bloodtest to be certain, and prescribe lithium. Without mood crisis, the patient can live without pissing of friends and family, and has only lost 15 years and a dozen relationships. In other case, the patient kill themselves.

Becoming copacetic with the reality you actually live in is necessary to surviving any environment. Even dogs and prisoners understand this. Even the rich get depressed and kill themselves.

The most deranged people you come across are the ones who cannot accept the fundamental shortcomings, toxicities and inhumane dysfunctions of their environment. Most people don't have the guts for rebellion and are best served making the best of their situation. The ones who have what it takes don't complain, they just go immanentize the eschaton.

Look at wartime propaganda/psyops. Your own country will bombard you with positivity. The enemy will bombard you with negativity. One side has an interest in your continued survival. The other is actively trying to kill you.

2) CBT is also anything but status quo. I think the thing that the above comments mentions is just window dressing for trying to go back to older approaches... it's hilarious how much the workbooks emphasize that no-no, your feelings are not invalid! No, no! Validate your feelings! Soothe yourself! They are totally valid! They just may be "inappropriate for the situation". Or, "unjustified". Or, "not productive". Now that we've got that out of the way and you still believe you are being coddled and totally valid, let's get to making a plan to fix the problem, or at least immersing your face in cold water or doing the opposite action to actually fix things.

3) In any case, shortcomings of capitalism as opposed to what?

I think this comment is literally 180, it's one of the wrongest takes I've seen in my entire life. As an immigrant from ex-socialist country, I'd bet the problem with mental health in advanced economies has a lot in common, metaphorically, with the problem of allergies in advanced economies, where the immune system has nothing to do and starts messing up. Capitalism have spoiled you all so much you have become too soft. Instead of validating the feelings and acknowledging emotions, anywhere between 50 to 90% of the people could benefit from some hardening the f- up :)

Such as, by suppressing negative emotions.

I promise you, good sessions just aren’t like that. My psych is amazing. We don’t talk about how “society has to change” because the pain I’ve experienced isn’t really about society any more. And the point of sessions isn’t to fix society, it’s to help me (the patient) heal and grow. I’ve never felt bullied by her - not for a second.

I’m sorry if you haven’t had a good therapist. As I say, maybe 80% of psychs are flushable. But some people are genuinely amazing and can help a great deal. They’ve certainly helped me.

The psych is expected to know an awful lot more than you about the whole process and subject.. so if you need to think critically about the psych, you don't really have the knowledge base to do well.

Taking what a psychiatrist has said as a golden rule, has wasted time and led me down the wrong road.

There is no subsitute for making up your own mind, or hearing the truth from the highest quality/rawest sources. And those sources are basically in universities and high quality education materials.

Most of the information just generally available in society and delivered by 'professionals'.... is a long, long way from what an adult needs to make rational decisions.

Not necessarily, for one how often people really stare at the cues of a negative event, and try to suppress it versus trying to suppress an internal imagination of the event? Secondly, there’s a greater confound in which externalizing your fear to begin with has a positive effect on processing the affect.

It’s also not clear enough how the operationalize “the suppress”, because it is a difficult and paradoxical task to execute volitionally especially in the context of acute anxiety, because anxiety’s job is literally to interrupt your normal salience structure, and make it self salient non-volitionally.

There is another devil in the detail, the target negative events are self-selected by the participants, so in all likelihood, the most disturbing events are not going to be readily consciously available, and whatever comes up here are going to be things that are already filtered to be easier to deal with.

In contrast in obsessive compulsive disorder, the intrusiveness of the imaginations will be all consuming. In which case it is contraindicated to try suppressing the thought, because it definitely will backfire, as it is precisely what maintains the disorder, but instead it is about learning to stay unresponsive in the face of exposure (ie not scratching the itch) of such thoughts, which is known as exposure and response prevention. Yet still, this method is not found to be necessarily more successful than straight out CBT either.

So I appreciate your perspective as I think it aligns with mine.

I believe that for situations where a single human has enough information and ability to ascertain the truth, most humans deliberately will not make a beeline for the truth. They sort of veer off to the side towards a half truth that better suits their situation. None of this is a conscious choice though.

Self deception is completely orthogonal to our ability to ascertain the actual truth. As I said even if we were magically gifted this ability, most choose not to use that ability.

Of course this quality lives on a gradient, some people are really good at self deception, others are really bad at it.

True. But the problem here is that this "skill" you think you have. It might be just a lie you tell yourself. You wouldn't know. That's the nature of lying to ourselves. Humans are all highly irrational creatures. Yet individually when we think of ourselves.... all of us unequivocally think of ourselves and most of our actions as rational.

This includes you.

The important part is understand that you can't be perfect, Socrates understood that there were many things he didn't understand, a good programmer will understand that there are many ways he could improve, but doesn't mean that they think they are bad.

Quotes like these are huge indicators of self deception. I mean it may be true, but usually the only person who cares for these quotes are the ones who have a strong desire to believe that it applies to them.

You realize most people don't think religion is evil? How could others come to a completely different conclusion than you? It's because of self deception. They believe an interpretation of religion that best fits their lifestyle. That's the point. You didn't do that.

>I think people fight very hard to ignore death, that's why existential moments find them in bed at night or when they are alone and quiet with their thoughts.

No you're just projecting. I think people nearer to death fight this thought. But people farther from death easily don't think about it. It's easy for most people not to think about it at all... but not when it's constantly thrown in their face. That's why your friend got pissed at u You're basically exposing his self-deception. He doesn't want to think of that shit.

I think if you want to make yourself happier you need to get stupider. Stop thinking about these things. Distract yourself with something you can get lost with so you can't think about things. Surround yourself with yes-men who lie to you, avoid the truth.

I would say for HN you're in the minority.

Basically they can do quantitative experiments where they have groups of people rate others about how attractive they are 1-10 and through this gather an average rating about someones attractiveness.

Then they have those people who were rated, rate themselves. Of course they also measure for happiness too. Turns out the less happy you are, the more accurately you rated yourself in turns of attractiveness.

What I described is just one experiment out of many trying to measure this phenomenon of self deception. It is completely consistent in most experiments. Almost every single one results in a positive correlation between happiness and self-deception.

Actually, the first reference is the scan (the slices are MRI), so an image of analysis. Then, the slicer can suggest removal (of the «bad memories»).

If anybody perceived it as sensational, they should go beyond the impact and perceive it as operational, or as sympathetical (your fellow man is performing his burden - where a bit of apprehension for the in-a-perspective "painful" act is shared experience).

[0]: https://bookshop.org/p/books/why-we-need-religion-stephen-t-...

The way out is agency over how you deal with reality, not better blindfolds in the short term.

Another argument is that you are denying yourself of the experience of being human. These feelings exist for a reason, just as physical pain exists for a reason. You wouldn't hurt yourself on purpose (or maybe you do c;), but physical pain helps you stay safe. I feel this is the same purpose of negative feelings.

Finally, I have found out that suppressing these feelings does not allow you to fully process and heal from the events that trigger them.

>There's nothing further for me to learn from the situation

its unlikely that you are suppressing anything. To be at that point you have to had dealt with it already and are just not getting hung up on the past anymore. Which you arguably shouldnt, having dealt with the situation means you know what to look out for in the future to not become that version of yourself again. There is nothing left to suppress here, people arent a static entity through time.

Suppression for me implies not having dealt with the situation and not having learnt its lessons. Otherwise you wouldnt need to suppress it.

The whole thread is really a great showcase for assumed attribution of meaning and the inherit loss in complexity in language.

Be that as it may, there is a big difference between not wallowing and ignoring/suppressing something. Especially if you leave Freud out.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/suppress

Suppression implies force and a struggle. Its quite different from not dwelling.

I am pretty sure we are talking two ends of the same spectrum with an upper and a lower bound. The reason its worth pointing out is that the simplification otherwise creates new problems due to overcorrecting. While not pointlessly dwelling on negative stuff is certainly good advice, it doesnt mean suppressing negative stuff you havent dealt with is a good idea in the long run. Suppressing the knowledge of information that create negative emotions is a bad idea since its very likely valuable information you will need in the future to not repeat your mistakes. One is a problem with agency over emotions and reactions, one is a practical functional problem.

I think the reference to Freud and suppression might be a not thought through attention grab on part of the authors. Different to what their press statement says, what they have found does not run counter to accepted narratives. While i sympathize with the need for funding, this is a dumb spin.