Comment by captainbland | Hacker News Reader

Comment by captainbland | Hacker News Reader

I suppose it wouldn't be that surprising. Mindfulness for instance teaches you to "let go" of thoughts - which is really just a gentle form of suppression. CBT encourages you to redirect existing negative thoughts in a positive/constructive direction - ultimately steering you away from or undermining the original negative thought - but does not encourage you to do a deep dive on it. Not to mention that Freud was a quack who was more prone to speculation than to science, so if traditional psychotherapy is based on his work then it is likely built on sand.

Taken to the opposite extreme, I think it's in some sense obvious that some degree of suppression is actually good for you, precisely because ruminating for long periods of time is clearly bad for you.

From a neurological point of view, why should we see reiterating negative thoughts as any different from reinforcement learning? If we revisit these negative topics, are we not strengthening their presence in our minds?

That said this study does not sound like it proves that suppressing negative thoughts works over a long period of time. The original theory posits that these suppressed thoughts might cause problems even years later when the latest this was followed up was a period of three months. So grains of salt etc.

The trouble with suppressing negative thoughts in the long run is that, eventually, reality may force you to confront them all at once and under far more difficult conditions.

I'm a strong believer that you have to confront negative thoughts and resolve underlying issues as soon as they arise and not neglect them and tell yourself that everything is going to be OK. It's not going to be OK. Murphy's law; what can go wrong WILL go wrong. This has been shown to me over and over again. You cannot leave anything to chance.

I'd rather have a few negative thoughts from time to time and resolve them as they come than fool myself into thinking that I'm living in la-la land and then after a few years find out that it has become hell on earth due to my neglect.

It's like a garden; you need to maintain it. If you ignore the weeds, they'll eventually take over your garden. You can tell yourself that the weeds add charm and make your garden look more natural; that you're going for a "wild tropical look" or whatever, all part of the plan, but with that attitude, you're bound to fail. You'll just keep getting more of whatever it is that you neglect until it becomes unbearable.

Well, maybe or maybe not. A lot of the negative thoughts I have are somewhat fleeting, and if I revisit them the next day they seem pretty trivial and I could probably dismiss them sooner.

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 fleeting part is essentially what certain types of meditation are all about.

Negative thoughts and emotions have to actively be fueled by something in order to persist.

And if you spend some time by simply observing those thoughts from a non judgmental stand point they’ll quickly disappear.

> Negative thoughts and emotions have to actively be fueled by something in order to persist.

I don’t think that’s true right? Negative thoughts and emotions occur naturally. If you’re statement we’re true then positive thoughts have to be fueled by something to persist. So then what is fuel - any stimulus at all?

The underlying issue is the thoughts. Once you have done all you can do many start worrying the future won't unfold as they predicted. Fool yourself into thinking you live in some hell on earth is worse than thinking you might be happy with your current situation.

I feel like happiness itself is also like a garden and needs to be maintained. You need to take intermittent breaks to look for weeds.

Perhaps you would understand if you accepted that some of us feel like we're surrounded by weeds, weeds that cloud our vision and impede our movement, which prevent us from detecting any beauty or value in our garden; we've forgotten what roses and tomatoes look like altogether.

Therefore, our approach and solutions are different from what you're espousing.

My view is it's sort of a balance. There's a place for confronting negative thoughts but it's possible to spend too much energy doing so which can also have negative consequences.

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.

> The trouble with suppressing negative thoughts in the long run is that, eventually, reality may force you to confront them all at once and under far more difficult conditions.

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.

A negative thought is just a thought, it's not like you need to actively not take care of real life things or errands. But if you find yourself thinking about death, or about how much your childhood sucked, or that you're good for nothing, you don't need to address anything about those thoughts.

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.

> But if you find yourself thinking about death, or about how much your childhood sucked, or that you're good for nothing, you don't need to address anything about those thoughts.

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

Negative visualization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_visualization is absolutely a thing. If you do it properly (aiming towards psychological resilience and gratitude for the things one actually has) it can work quite well.

Of course it exists, I described it in my comment. Look at this quote from wikipedia and compare it to my example of preparing for your parents to die:

> Unlike the general focus of creative visualization of inducing an imaginary positive psychological and physiologic response, negative visualization focuses on training the practitioner on the negative outcomes of realistic life scenarios to desensitize or create psychological fitness in preparation for real-life losses

Something existing and some people thinking it is a good idea doesn't mean it is. I'm not saying I'm right either, I'm sharing what I do and what I think. And what I think is that negative visualization is ridiculous. Live your life, bad things will happen anyway, why do you want to be sad in advance just to maybe be a little bit less sad later? I can't take this idea seriously, it's like someone who doesn't want to love for fear of getting a broken heart.

As someone just now learning I have been negative visualizing since childhood, I’ll tell you it’s not a choice exactly. The thoughts just come to you (someone is going to die, I’m going to die, etc.)… sometimes I’m successful at knocking the thought out of my head quickly. Other times I dwell for a few minutes, having a mini-grieving session thinking what I would do in the situation. It passes and I go back to present life where you don’t think about these things at all. I don’t know if it’s something innate that I got used to and I subconsciously need to do for some reason (and perhaps others do not)… not sure how much more resilient I’ll be if/when anything terrible happens, so agree not sure if best use of time

Many things can also be framed so they’re not negative. Take your parents dying, for example. Everyone has finite time on this Earth. The relationships we choose to cultivate in our short existence are part of what make life beautiful. A life well lived can be something celebrate not mourn. Similarly, hardships in childhood can be something to decry and lament. Or they can be viewed as a the crucible in which your steely mettle was forged. How you think about these things is likely a reflection about how you feel about yourself.

I think there's an important difference between a negative thought about X and an introspective but emotionally more neutral thought about X.

Unsure why you’re being downvoted - bizarre.

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.

I believe there are different types or modes of thinking. Some tend to avoid negativity, others live through it to anchor in reality.

Also, maybe it’s subjective, but all my friends who are negative-aware and embrace cynicism (not necessarily follow it) have much better sense of real life and of characters than all my friends who believe in all good things and are optimists. The former tend to be business people, the latter are all hired workers.

It depends a great deal on the nature of the negative thought.

For example: spending hours obsessively thinking about death and dying and infinite nothingness isn’t helpful in my opinion.

But avoiding thinking about a mole you might want to get checked out at the doctor is a bad idea.

This study was measuring the effectiveness of trained suppression - not distraction or letting go, but specifically not imagining the event. I found it surprising, but at the same time avoidance might just have weakened the mental strength for doing exactly that.

> Mindfulness for instance teaches you to "let go" of thoughts - which is really just a gentle form of suppression

Have to disagree. To let go you have to acknowledge/accept the subject. Suppression misses this IMHO.

> Not to mention that Freud was a quack who was more prone to speculation than to science, so if traditional psychotherapy is based on his work then it is likely built on sand.

Wow, that’s rich. Dismissing Freud like this is the most egregious way of conducting a discussion about these topics. Have you also ever thought that Mindfulness and CBT, while effective, are successful in a capitalistic society because ultimately convince us we can change to accept the fundamentals shortcomings and toxicities and inhumane dysfunctions of capitalism? Freud’s take on the mind was revolutionary, Mindfulness and CBT have a solid ground but have become a strong weapon in favor of the preservation of the status quo by convincing us we are just wrong in a perfectly fine environment (which in reality is not fine at all).

> Mindfulness and CBT have a solid ground but have become a strong weapon

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.

Ok then let's put it this way. They became weaponized, because they have a great ability in convincing people they're in need of fixing, instead of questioning the dysfunctional and fundamentally unequal society we live in.

I think you may be in fight mode and your perception is strongly coloured by it.

> convincing people they're in need of fixing

Holy smokes Siegmund! I think we all carry some form of trauma that is more than worth healing. I invested 21 years into it and am more than glad i did.

Equality is a lovely ideal to strive towards.

[Edit] add missing word

I think I said it enough on this website, but my personal experience with 4 psychanalyst led me to believe this is a quackery, a pseudoscience, and actually harmful for people who have real mental issues.

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.

I believe your experience might be related to how psychoanalists work in the US (or the country you're from)? Here in Germany it's a highly regulated practice, and believe me, psychoanalysts refuse constantly patients with the pathological problems you describe because they are aware that psychoanalysis' is not fit for those. In fact they are also perfectly aware they are not psychiatrists, and they would never be able to prescribe nor help you get out of any medication.

I'm from France. It's regulated here too. They just think manic phase are 'female hysteria'. They are dangerous and I an certain osteopathic therapy brought more actual knowledge to PT than psychoanalysis ever brought to psychology.

At least their Jungian archetype and the 'animus anima' are 50% less sexists that they used to be and are now marketable for 'self help' expert, so I guess they are now able to make money by scamming without endangering people.

> Mindfulness and CBT have a solid ground but have become a strong weapon in favor of the preservation of the status quo by convincing us we are just wrong in a perfectly fine environment (which in reality is not fine at all)

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.

1) Mindfulness is a few millenia older than capitalism.

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.

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