Counsel from a science writer and ultra-endurance athlete who tried for years to manage his thoughts during long-distance races. How can you try to stop unpleasant thoughts from coming to mind during a race or in your daily life?
We are living in a time when problems and uncertainty make it difficult to breathe. You might have put off your goals and aspirations in this setting and given in to your day-to-day concerns.
Recognising the past always comes first when one is unhappy with the present. You can be experiencing unsettling recollections and ideas. Is it therefore possible to eliminate them?
In an article for Psychology Today, health and science writer Christopher Bergland, who has personally experienced hours-long ultramarathons in challenging outdoor environments, offers a workable solution for overcoming pessimistic thoughts.
"It takes expertise to stop undesired thoughts from happening. People who are specifically advised not to think about pink elephants or white bears are more inclined to think about those creatures, as demonstrated by the "pink elephant" and "white bear" experiments.
Therefore, the "white bear problem" illustrates how the mind is genuinely controlled by conscious efforts to conceal unpleasant or upsetting thoughts.
What is the ideal strategy for resolving the paradoxical "white bear problem" and controlling unwanted thoughts, then?
According to a recent study titled "If you don't let them in, you don't have to push them away," the most effective strategy for managing undesired ideas is "proactive thought control." On July 14, 2022, the study conducted by Eran Eldar and Isaac Fradkin was published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology.
"Can we prevent an unwanted thought from coming to mind in a similar way to how we might avoid an unwanted action?" was the research question posed for this study. Fradkin and Eldar conducted a free-association experiment with eighty English-speaking individuals in order to get a response to this topic.
The two scientists instructed the participants in the experiment to refrain from repeating specific word associations after providing them with verbal signals.
The researchers found that proactive cognitive control was far more successful in suppressing unpleasant ideas than reactive cognitive control when they compared the two using an information processing analysis.
Generally speaking, reactive cognitive control involves changing or rejecting a notion after it has entered consciousness. On the other hand, proactive cognitive management involves keeping it out of one's head before it starts to take over as part of an unpleasant thought loop.
Preventive thought control, which is based on the "white bear" paradox, is challenging because, if you intentionally try to suppress a thought, you will unavoidably be compelled to think about it, which means that your mind will naturally gravitate towards it.