A new way to stop unwanted negative thoughts, according to science ...Middle East

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I’ve always been fascinated by how thoughts can occasionally pop into our heads, seemingly from nowhere – and how it can sometimes be hard to make unwanted thoughts go away.

Serious intrusive thoughts can be a feature of several mental health conditions, including depression, anxiety, PTSD and obsessive compulsive disorder. “Intrusive thoughts cause a lot of mental pain to the people suffering them,” said Dr Michael Anderson, a neuroscientist who is one of the Cambridge experts.

Intrusive thoughts may be less widely known about in depression, which is seen as a condition of low mood. But people with depression often dwell on unwanted memories and feelings, and this can stop them from recovering.

Dr Anderson’s specialty may seem on the face of it an odd place for a mental health breakthrough. He is a memory researcher, famous in the field for his discovery, two decades ago, that when we forget things, it is not necessarily due to memories fading naturally over time, but can be due to people making conscious efforts to suppress them – at least in lab tests.

“In our world, we have much to think about – but we also have much to not think about,” he wrote in a recent thread on his work on X. Thought-stopping is vital for concentration and banishing distracting thoughts, he added.

People do better at such tasks if they have higher levels of a chemical called Gaba in part of the brain called the hippocampus, known for its role in memory.

Supporting the idea, various other teams of scientists have found that part of the hippocampus is smaller – and so, perhaps less able to effectively block memories – in people with the intrusive memories of PTSD. This was seen, for instance, in a study that compared those who developed PTSD after the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, with those caught up in the events who did not get PTSD.

Some thoughts can feel impossible to ignore (Photo: Getty)

In the meantime, Dr Anderson’s team has been testing a technique to help people deliberately suppress intrusive thoughts, in a similar way to how he first showed people can suppress memories.

For instance, one woman was frightened that her dad would become ill and need hospital treatment, so her cue word was “hospital”.

Everyone also answered questions about their mental health, including about any depression and anxiety symptoms.

Delivery by app

The team is now developing an app that can deliver the same kind of suppression training in a personalised way, although Dr Anderson says he can’t say when it will be available.

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The approach should also be tested by other scientists before we can conclude that it works, ideally in larger groups of volunteers, said Dr Lawrence Patihis, a psychologist and memory expert at the University of Portsmouth, who was not involved in the work. “But if it’s true, it will help.”

The first results from NHS patients getting weight-loss jabs through an app show treatment via smartphone works as well as in-person appointments and can help five times the number of patients.

I’ve been reading

The print magazine sadly folded last month (although its website lives on), and that’s now understandable after reading Johnson’s gossipy, indiscrete and highly amusing tell-all.

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