In the 1980s, Harvard University conducted an experiment to determine the effect of suppression of thought, american social psychologist and professor Daniel Wegner conducted it on the basis of an anecdote told by Leon Tolstoy in the late 19th century.
The results of this experiment showed that suppression of thoughts, or rather attempts to suppress them directly, is unproductive. Thoughts always come back to our minds consciously, but also through dreams.
There is a rebound of thought or repressed memory. Wegner called this a bimodal ironic control mechanism.
Wegner’s experience of suppressing thought was based on a well-known anecdote by writer Leon Tolstoy.
Tolstoy said he had to do a test to join his older brother’s circle of friends, they said he should sit in a corner and that he couldn’t leave until he stopped thinking about a polar bear.
Poor Tolstoy was unsuccessful and remained there for hours. The more he tried to suppress thoughts related to a polar bear, the more his mind would turn to visualize the bear. The image of the bear always came to mind.
The more I struggled to suppress this thought, the more the polar bear struggled to reappear.
“Try to impose the task of not thinking about a polar bear and you’ll see this damn animal all the time. “Leo Tolstoy?
Daniel Wegner’s experience based on this event was developed in several stages. In the first, he informed the participants that for the next five minutes, they were free to think about what they wanted. They only had one limitation: not thinking about a polar bear.
He asked that, during this time, a bell would ring if the polar bear appeared in his thoughts, even if they tried not to think of him. Participants rang the bell during the five-minute experiment.
They rang the bell several times at intervals of less than a minute, i. e. the more they tried not to think about the polar bear, the more intensely their display returned to their minds.
Second, he asked the participants to write their thoughts before falling asleep and asked half the group to write down all their thoughts, except those that had to do with a certain person they loved very much.
He gave them specific instructions to even erase thoughts about that person and also asked the other half to include someone they loved very much, writing their initials.
Subsequently, he analyzed the participants’ dreams, with a total of 295 students participating in the experiment. People who repressed trying to avoid thinking about a particular person dreamed almost twice as much as those who included the person in their thoughts.
The conclusions of Wegner’s experiment have been replicated in other similar studies with identical results: suppression of thoughts gives them a mental return.
Thus, we are talking about a strategy not only ineffective to eliminate thoughts, but also unproductive.
Wegner called this effect the bimodal ion control mechanism; later, in psychology, it was called post-suppression rebound effect.
It seems that one part of our brain works intentionally and consciously, while the other party does so under involuntary subconscious monitoring processes.
The unconscious watchful part refers the observed thought to the intentional part and produces the paradox of the constant visualization of the object of non-real thought.
The results of Wegner’s experiment helped introduce the polar bear concept in a different and much more practical way. Trying to change the center of consciousness to another interest is very effective in dealing with intrusive thoughts of any kind.
Thus, it has been proven that thought does not tend to return to the center of consciousness, because it is not repressed, it is only replaced by another, so when recurring thoughts arise we should not suppress them.
Knowing that it doesn’t work is very important when it comes to intrusive thoughts. The next time you have a recurring thought, try replacing it, for example, with a polar bear.