Squash unwanted thoughts to reduce fear, anxiety and boost your mood
Squash unwanted thoughts to reduce fear, anxiety and boost your mood
Harry Potter and friends were onto something when defeating their boggarts
Harry Potter and the conjuring fear
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was one of my favourite books of the series.
I loved the introduction of Professor Lupin and his wolvish ways, the rebellious but loyal Sirius Black, and the concept of Dementors in general.
I still use this description in relation to some people we all encounter. You know the ones - they suck the life and energy out of you and the room, but you can’t work out why.
Anyway, it also introduced boggarts - the physical manifestation of fear. Whether it was spiders, test failure, losing loved ones or a full moon, we all have fears that keep us worried and distracted at night.
Teaching the students to conjure, notice their fear but find ways to banish it was on the curriculum for budding wizards to learn and survive in the world.
What if we did this in real life?
In a recent study by Mamat and Anderson (2023), they trained 120 adults from 16 countries over 3 days online to learn how to suppress fearful or neutral thoughts1.
I doubt this physically involved manifesting and defeating boggarts but in an alternative universe, that might have happened.
Mamat and Anderson (2023) wanted to challenge the century-old Freudian-influenced notion that suppressing negative thoughts leads them to rebound through other more intense and frequent activities, such as dreams or unhelpful sensations and flashbacks.
Instead, they investigated whether they could replicate opposing clinical and neurobiological reports that squashing unwanted thoughts improve wellbeing and mental health.
For example, engaging the right lateral prefrontal cortex to suppress intrusive thoughts is associated with greater resilience to developing posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after violent trauma (11), decreased anxiety about feared events…
This hypothesis and their findings surprised me. Having had therapy for trauma myself, I know how acknowledging and releasing those difficult negative thoughts can be a powerful way to explore what drives unhelpful emotions and behaviours.
I also know you can get stuck in a loop and those unwanted thoughts become distracting and unhelpful if we focus on them over and over again without looking for ways to reframe or move past them - the frustrations of worry.
I’ll admit I was curious to understand this study as it could give us an alternative way to deal with unhelpful or unwanted thoughts with specific practice and effort.
What gets in the way of suppressing unpleasant thoughts?
For people with anxiety, depression or PTSD, there might be ineffective control and ability to inhibit memory and emotion that generates from circuits and structures in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus.
Similar to the Harry Potter boggart conjuring process, participants in the study were asked to share their future feared events and assign a cue word related to this fear (fears) - this word described a core aspect of what they typically imagine with this fear.
Participants did the same with neutral and positive future events (hopes) and defined related word cues.
The training protocol involved participants being asked to imagine a future event vividly when presented with the related word cue (fears, neutral or hopes) - the imagine process.
In some elements, they were then asked to stop themselves from imagining the future event once the word cue was recognised, and prevent any memory retrieval or imagery related to it - the thought suppression process.
They repeated this imagine process and thought suppression process across 3 days and practised each process 36 times. Around half the group acted as the control, suppressing neutral thoughts, but the other half suppressed distressing thoughts.
Right after the final training session, both groups had their memory and mood (affect) assessed to understand the impact on their mental health.
The mental health assessment was repeated 3 months after the initial online training to investigate if there were any lasting changes in the groups, whether positive or negative.
What did the study discover?
The main focus was to investigate the impact of suppressing distressing thoughts, and the impact on mental health i.e. could the boggart be successfully defeated?
The study found that training people to suppress recalling distressing or fearful thoughts did not result in those thoughts rebounding on average.
They also found that participants found it harder to remember details and vividness of thoughts they were asked to thought suppress.
These results were also supported for participants reporting anxiety, depression and PTSD - a population that often suffers from vivid memory recall of distressing thoughts.
The emotional impact of distressing thoughts is often what is most challenging. Emotions and feelings can take over and prevent us from doing what we know would be helpful but cannot complete. This drives further distress.
Here the study found that emotional responses were often reduced after suppression training. Also, suppression-related reductions in fear perception was stronger in participants with anxiety, depression and PTSD.
Overall, mental health measures improved after training participants in suppressing distressing thoughts. Mental health improvements weren’t as significant in the group suppressing neutral thoughts, but there was a reduction in worry and negative mood.
One of the most exciting aspects of this study is that positive impacts remained at the 3 month follow up in the fearful thought suppression group.
They found they were better at controlling their fearful thoughts (when reminded of the word cues), which surprised them.
What else did participants take with them?
82% of all participants used thought suppression for existing and new fears, and 87% found the process useful.
The training process for supressing memory retrieval might be successful because it recruits the inhibitory mechanisms that become less effective in people with anxiety and PTSD.
Although the neural mechanisms were not directly studied in this research, the results demonstrate that skills related to observing and supressing distressing thoughts can be taught and positively improves mental health aspects such as mood and emotional impact.
Maybe we believe we can’t control our thoughts until we’re trained to.
As demonstrated in Harry Potter, the real lesson was Harry and his student buddies realising they could defeat their boggart and triumph.
This metacognitive skill (thinking about our thinking) is something we should all learn. It’s an invaluable tool in our mental toolkit and the impact lasts.🚀
Let me know what you're keen to learn or talk about in the comments or on chat.
This is your space too, so let's enjoy it together.
Take care,
Sabrina Ahmed
Burnout Coach | Neuroscientist | Art-based Practitioner
It is certainly beneficial to be able to think about ones thinking process, and suppress fears or negative thoughts when necessary. Thanks for sharing Sabrina. The analogy to the well known figures of the Hogwarts School certainly enriches your writing. These tales are definitely not for children only, but still they may have the additional therapeutic effect on children anyhow. Wow, that's great.