You’ve probably heard the idea at some point in your life that suppressing negative thoughts or emotions is bad for you. If you suppress them they’ll just erupt in some unexpected way. Therefore it’s better, so we’ve been told, to spend time in therapy talking through those negative thoughts at length. That’s the path to healing.

But a newly released study by researchers at Cambridge University suggests those ideas may be fundamentally wrong. Dr. Michael Anderson, the director of the new research connected the findings all the way back to Freud.

“We’re all familiar with the Freudian idea that if we suppress our feelings or thoughts, then these thoughts remain in our unconscious, influencing our behaviour and wellbeing perniciously,” said Professor Michael Anderson.

“The whole point of psychotherapy is to dredge up these thoughts so one can deal with them and rob them of their power. In more recent years, we’ve been told that suppressing thoughts is intrinsically ineffective and that it actually causes people to think the thought more – it’s the classic idea of ‘Don’t think about a pink elephant’.

These ideas have become dogma in the clinical treatment realm, said Anderson, with national guidelines talking about thought avoidance as a major maladaptive coping behaviour to be eliminated and overcome in depression, anxiety, PTSD, for example.

But it’s possible all of that conventional wisdom is wrong. Anderson and his student Dr. Zulkayda Mamat took the exact opposite approach and found results were entirely positive. NBC News describes how the experiment worked:

Their research involved 120 adults from 16 countries, who were each asked to list 20 fears about things that might happen in the future, 20 hopes and 36 neutral events, such a visit to the eye doctor.

“The fears couldn’t be generic, like ‘I’m worried that aliens are going to land on Earth.’ They’re things that are going through your mind recurrently that cause distress,” Anderson said.

Next, the participants came up with a word that reminded them of each type of event. For instance, if a person’s fear was that their parents would get severely sick with Covid, the word might be “hospital.”

The participants were given just 20 minutes of training on how to confront the word associated with one of their fears and then block out the negative thoughts without trying to distract themselves. They just learned to push the thoughts away. And the results were quite positive:

Participants who reported high levels of anxiety to start saw their self-reported worries decline by 44%, on average. Among people with post-traumatic stress, their overall negative mental health (measured as a combination of self-reported anxiety, depression and worry) fell by an average of 16%, while their positive mental health increased by nearly 10%.

Three months after the study, 80% of those involved were still using the techniques they had learned (even though they hadn’t been told to) and overall depression scores in the group continued to drop. Scientific American compared this research to a type of behavioral therapy.

The technique bears a likeness to behavioral therapies in which people expose themselves to cues or situations that trigger fear and anxiety—heights, dirt or parties, say—until the brain learns to inhibit those fear responses, says Charan Ranganath, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the research. But learning to halt the thoughts that arise from those cues is a novel approach. “What’s surprising to me is telling people to stop that thought in and of itself is effective,” Ranganath says. “That’s an idea that could be really useful to bring into therapies.”

Naturally there are also some critics and one study of 120 people isn’t grounds for a completely new approach. Still, there’s enough here to suggest some of the conventional wisdom may be wrong that it will definitely get further study in the future. Dr. Anderson told NBC, “I certainly don’t think that there’s anything wrong with processing significant things in our lives, but for the majority of negative thoughts that we have, I’m not sure that recipe fits the bill.”