One thing we love about electronic devices is the certainty that, by pressing a single button, what we want is being done, from making a cup of coffee to opening our Instagram account or getting to the 10th floor of a building in a lift.
What if there was such a thing as a Mind Button?
And let’s say you could press it once in your lifetime.
When would you need such a life-saving device?
If you are like me, you’d choose one of those days when you desperately try to cut down on sweets and the only images that spitefully come to your mind are those of warm, buttery, flaky croissants.
Your hand will tremble with emotion before pushing the button, but the crescent-shaped pastry really needs to go (at least until you lose some weight).
Getting back to reality
We all know how challenging, even excruciatingly painful changes may be. A particularly tough aspect is that whenever unwanted thoughts pop up in our head, we choose to fight them, to chase them away from our mind.
Suppressing a thought is incredibly difficult and tiresome because your mind “has to constantly monitor your mental activity for the forbidden item,” argue Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn and psychologist Elissa Epel, “The brain can’t sustain the work of monitoring. It fatigues.”
We were warned of the inevitable failure of such an endeavour by Dostoevsky who wrote: if you decide not to think of a polar bear, “the damned animal will be constantly in your thoughts.”
He couldn’t have been more true (if you have doubts, feel free to set yourself this task and polar bears will even start haunting your dreams).
It was the Russian author who actually inspired Daniel Wegner, a Harvard social psychologist, to look into the process of thought suppression.
Why do we want to suppress our thoughts?
According to Wegner, we want to be free from “traumatic memories, from unpleasant emotions, from hateful addictions or untoward impulses, from fears, obsessions, worries about the future.” But the unwanted thoughts will keep plaguing us. Not surprisingly, he called this process “ironic rebound.”
Being aware of this psychological deadlock is not enough. The compelling question that I know you will ask is:
How do we manage our unwanted thoughts?
Paradoxically, one solution (the best in my view) is for you to acknowledge their presence and accept them.
Let them be.
Face them.
Stay with the pain.
I promise you that if you insist on this technique, the thoughts that you hate will start losing their power over you. Look for incremental improvements rather than quantum leaps.
If, on the other hand, you keep fighting these thoughts, you’ll be a Don Quixote fighting the windmills.
Is this what you want?
Further reading:
Fyodor Dostoevsky, “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions”
Daniel Wegner, “You Can’t Always Think What You Want: Problems in the Suppression of Unwanted Thoughts” https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/dwegner/files/wegner_1992_you_cant_always_think_what_you_want.pdf
E. Blackburn & E. Epel, The Telomere Effect
What kind of relationships do you want? 