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Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all

cam.ac.uk

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Re: Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all

#41

Post by jimkleiber »

99_00 wrote: post #28
corethree wrote: post #17

This has been known among psychologist for awhile now. In fact someone who is too honest, someone who see's the truth of the world is more likely to be clinically depressed. https://radiolab.org/podcast/91618-lying-to-ourselves This podcast from radiolab really changed my perspective on the concept. Pretty much if you're not depressed, most likely some aspect of you is delusional. I would say people on HN are especia…

You seem to be suggesting that humans are capable of perceive objective truth for non trivial things. I say that we aren't. And given that, you are better off believing the lie that helps you or makes you feel good instead of the one that hurts you, assuming both have the same predictive power.

I tell people "I don't know if your intentions are good or bad and I may never know. If I believe they're bad, I feel bad. If I believe they're good, I feel good. So I choose to believe they're good."

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

Re: Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all

#42

Post by cf141q5325 »

Aloha wrote: post #33

Too much navel gazing being bad, is I think almost obvious enough to not require study. I just wished more people practiced it.

Thats an unfair simplification the article doesnt allow for. There is no reason to throw out introspection with not engaging with toxic thought patterns. Especially as a lack of the former often leads to a helplessness regarding the later.

Re: Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all

#43

Post by jimkleiber »

corethree wrote: post #17

This has been known among psychologist for awhile now. In fact someone who is too honest, someone who see's the truth of the world is more likely to be clinically depressed. https://radiolab.org/podcast/91618-lying-to-ourselves This podcast from radiolab really changed my perspective on the concept. Pretty much if you're not depressed, most likely some aspect of you is delusional. I would say people on HN are especia…

I wonder if the "someone who sees the truth of the world is more likely to be clinically depressed" is related to seeing a truth and not expressing it.

Lately I've really been starting to wonder if depression is the opposite of expression. Or in other words, instead of pushing feelings/thoughts out (ex-press), we push them down (de-press).

I can say from my experience when I feel very confident that I see what's happening and I don't say it, I can feel depressed. Or if I do say what I see and people around me deny what I see, then I can stop expressing and start depressing and feel that depression even more as I close off from others and from myself.

Re: Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all

#44

Post by jimkleiber »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #36
yomly wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am personally atheist/apathetic. The closest thing you could get me to profess a religious fervour to is exercise (or martial arts) and mother nature. That said, I am a huge proponent of religion and can see how it is so important to people like my mother. She doesn't preach or judge but I can see how faith anchors her. It gives her answers and an unyielding optimism in the face of difficulty, and I can tell you as…

Don't get me wrong, there was a lot of bad with religion but modern faith in places like the UK or the Nordics seems to be a net benefit IMO... Even in light of what the Christian Nationalist movement is striving towards in the US, and in light of the ugly persistence of fundamentalism in places like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan?

I wonder if it's like any technology and trade offs between helping/hurting people. If religions help 95% of people be more loving and 5% be more hateful, would it be a net benefit? Does it depend what those 5% do with the hate or the 95% with the love? What if the percentages were different?

Obviously an overly simplistic thought experiment, yet I wonder if we have any way, that isn't arbitrary, to say if a tool is net beneficial.

Side note...I've often played with the idea in the past of what I called the case for moral superposition: nothing is good or bad, everything is good AND bad, but thinking makes it good OR bad.

Re: Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all

#45

Post by toasted-subs »

whatyesaid wrote: post #7

For ethical reasons, no participant was given a negative event to imagine, but only positive or neutral ones. 120 people and three months and during COVID. Just because it's from Cambridge don't assume credibility.

I think most people in psychiatry don't want to admit the patients are typically victims and society has to be the one to change. In my opinion most psychological techniques induce the behaviors they are attempting to suppress effectively bullying the people who are seeking help.

Re: Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all

#46

Post by WendyTheWillow »

whatyesaid wrote: post #7

For ethical reasons, no participant was given a negative event to imagine, but only positive or neutral ones. 120 people and three months and during COVID. Just because it's from Cambridge don't assume credibility.

That’s the literal definition of credibility firstly, and secondly if 120 people and covid were properly controlled for, neither of these facts invalidates the study. You can find statistically valid conclusions from 120 people, for sure.

Just read the damn paper, rather than presume it’s credible or dismiss it because they couldn’t run it on 100,000 people over the course of 30 years.

Re: Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all

#47

Post by maxbond »

cf141q5325 wrote: post #32

When ever this notion comes up i cant help but wonder how good crashing and burning thanks to ignoring reality is for your mental health. Just because stuff isnt nice doesnt mean its safe to ignore. Its worth mentioning that dealing with negative thoughts and experiences is part of how we grow as people. Its why Bambis mother got shot in a Disney movie. Because sooner or later, kids have to deal with harsh stuff. Unf…

I regularly dismiss thoughts that are distressing but not at all necessary to dwell on. For instance, sometimes when I'm working, a certain problem I'm having or technology I'm working with will remind me of some stressful work situation I've had in the past. There's no reason to relitigate some bullshit that happened years ago, so I do my best to set it aside. I'm not ignoring any important reality, none of that matters anymore. There's nothing further for me to learn from the situation, I've already analyzed it to death and there's no new information available.

So the healthy thing to do is recognize that this is a spurious signal from my brain. It's relevance is only tangential, and dwelling on it would be stressful and unproductive; it's utility is negative, and it should be filtered out as noise.

You brain generates a bunch of signals and many of them just don't matter. It's not much different from finding shapes in clouds. But watching clouds is pleasant and easily stopped, so there's no harm in it. But ruminating is damaging and can be difficult to break out of if you get too far along in the process.

Re: Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all

#48

Post by NoZebra120vClip »

toasted-subs wrote: post #45
whatyesaid wrote: post #7

For ethical reasons, no participant was given a negative event to imagine, but only positive or neutral ones. 120 people and three months and during COVID. Just because it's from Cambridge don't assume credibility.

I think most people in psychiatry don't want to admit the patients are typically victims and society has to be the one to change. In my opinion most psychological techniques induce the behaviors they are attempting to suppress effectively bullying the people who are seeking help.

It is no coincidence that many psychotropic drugs induce the symptoms that they purport to treat.

Re: Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all

#49

Post by rayiner »

phailhaus wrote: post #19
RelativeDelta wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost like these arose as functional elements of society across time because they assisted those who followed them in outlasting their competitors. Weird.

They're stable and self-perpetuating, that doesn't make them better. There are plenty of abhorrent beliefs that also "stood the test of time".

I think you’ll find that for the most part beliefs that are present across religions are pro-adaptive in the economic and technological contexts in which they arise. I also think people fail to appreciate how much their own worldview reflects the religious tradition of their community. Coming from an eastern tradition, western secular humanism seems like an “ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of” Christianity.

Re: Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all

#50

Post by h0l0cube »

whatyesaid wrote: post #7

For ethical reasons, no participant was given a negative event to imagine, but only positive or neutral ones. 120 people and three months and during COVID. Just because it's from Cambridge don't assume credibility.

> no participant was given a negative event to imagine

I feel that's taken a little out of context. There were two trials:

> For No-imagine trials, participants were given one of their cue words, asked to first acknowledge the event in their mind. Then, while continuing to stare directly at the reminder cue, they were asked to stop thinking about the event – they should not try to imagine the event itself or use diversionary thoughts to distract themselves, but rather should try to block any images or thoughts that the reminder might evoke. For this part of the trial, one group of participants was given their negative events to suppress and the other given their neutral ones.

Emphasis added. And the trial you refer to:

> For Imagine trials, participants were given a cue word and asked to imagine the event as vividly as possible, thinking what it would be like and imagining how they would feel at the event. For ethical reasons, no participant was given a negative event to imagine, but only positive or neutral ones.

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