Rebound effect: Nothing sticks as intensely as what you want to forget

 

The rebound effect, or rebound effect, is one of the psychological phenomena that most influences our life, and also one of the most unknown. So we fall into his net all the time, allowing him to damage our mental balance . We allow him to make us make bad decisions because we are not aware of his influence.

What is the rebound effect?

“Try to matter this: don't think of a polar bear, and you'll see that the cursed animal will come back to you every minute,” wrote Fyodor Dostoievski in “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions” in 1863.

More than a century later, science proved him right. Daniel Wegner, a social psychologist at Harvard University, first discovered the rebound effect more than 25 years ago. He said that sentence caught his attention and became an enigma he couldn't stop thinking about, so he decided to check its reliability.

He devised a very simple experiment: he asked the participants to verbalize what they were thinking for five minutes, while trying not to think about a white bear. If a white bear came to mind, they had to ring a bell. Despite explicit instructions to avoid thinking about the polar bear, the participants thought about the animal on average more than once per minute.

Then Wegner asked them to do the same exercise, but this time intentionally trying to think of a white bear. At that point, participants thought of the polar bear more often than another group, who had been told they could think of the polar bear from the start, people who had not undergone the conditioning of thought censorship.

The results suggested that suppressing thought for just five minutes caused the image to “bounce” more intensely in the participants' minds later on. The experiment laid the foundation for the rebound effect.

The rebound effect occurs when we try hard to avoid something. Then the image or thought reaffirms itself in our consciousness, attracting us precisely to what we want to avoid. It is a paradoxical process, as Wegner himself described it, because it is very difficult to contain unwanted thoughts.

Psychological mechanism: why can't we get an idea out of our mind?

The psychological mechanism behind the rebound effect is very simple: when we try not to think about something, a part of our mind becomes a kind of "guardian" that tries to avoid the forbidden thought.

The problem is that this part is continuously activated to "check" that we are not thinking about it. At that precise moment, the unwanted idea re-enters our mind as a result of the constant process of control we are subjected to. The mind becomes hypervigilant and creates a trap for us.

This is, at least in part, the explanation for why we can't get our ex out of our minds, why we can't stop thinking about sweets when we're on a diet, or why the worry we want to get rid of haunts us every night. . Everything we resist will reappear with greater force.

The rebound effect undermines our decisions and behaviors

The rebound effect is not limited to the generation of unwanted images or thoughts, it directly affects our decisions and behaviors. In 2010, psychologists from the University of London carried out an experiment in which they observed the effects of suppressing thoughts related to chocolate.

They asked one third of the participants to think about chocolate, another third had to try to suppress their thoughts about chocolate and the last were not told anything. Everyone had to write down their thoughts during the experiment.

Subsequently, all the participants had the task of classifying chocolate of different qualities based on flavor. The researchers, however, weren't interested in the evaluation, but in the amount of chocolate they ate. They found that those who had tried to suppress their thoughts about chocolate ate far more of it.

The repression not only led to a rebound effect of thoughts on chocolate, but also intensified the urge to eat it. This effect was most evident in people who were already on a diet and tried to avoid daily consumption.

Those same researchers carried out another experiment that shows us the hidden strength of the rebound effect. On that occasion they conducted a larger study with smokers. Participants noted the number of cigarettes they smoked over a three-week period, taking the first week as the basis for assessing average cigarette consumption.

In the second week, some smokers were asked to try suppressing thoughts about smoking, others were told to think about smoking as often as possible, and the control group simply kept noting the number of cigarettes smoked.

The good news? The suppression led to a reduction in cigarette consumption during the second week in smokers who attempted to suppress their thoughts about smoking. The bad news? There was a major rebound effect in the third week.

These experiments suggest that "don't think about it" is bad advice. The more we try to suppress a thought, the stronger it will reappear later, causing us to make bad decisions.

These bad decisions are probably due, at least in part, to a nervous breakdown . When we have to be constantly vigilant to repress a thought or avoid certain behaviors, the level of control and attention end up cognitively destroying us. It is as if we are consuming our part of self-control, so that when we can't take it anymore, the doors open completely. But that doesn't mean we're completely at the mercy of the rebound effect.

Unwanted thoughts also sneak into dreams

The rebound effect is not limited to consciousness, the content repressed during the day can also appear in dreams. Wegner himself designed an experiment in which he asked some people to write down what they were thinking five minutes before going to bed.

Some were told that they should suppress their thoughts about another person, others to think precisely about that person and the latter could write freely. These in pre-sleep references caused participants to dream more often of the person in question, but the effect was even more pronounced when they consciously tried to suppress thoughts.

The rebound effect in dreams is due to the fact that when we sleep we lose the self-control that we normally consciously exercise, so the repressed elements are more likely to reappear. Therefore, if we are trying to quit smoking, we will probably dream that we are smoking. And if we want to forget a former partner, it is likely that he will continually reappear in dreams.

A factor that plays in favor of the rebound effect in dreams are the changes that occur in the prefrontal lobes when we sleep, especially in the phase of rapid eye movements. Repressed thoughts are more accessible during REM sleep as the effectiveness of working processes decreases. This ensures that thoughts from just before bed are more available and more research into this suppressed content occurs, a study from the University of New South Wales reveals.

Rebound effect: how to avoid it?

Wegner himself suggests several strategies to avoid the rebound effect and "suppress white bears":

1. Choose a good distraction element that absorbs our attention and focus on it. In one of his experiments, Wegner himself asked people to think of a red Volkswagen instead of suppressing the thought of the white bear. And it worked! Of course, that doesn't mean we should be thinking about a red Volkswagen, but looking for a positive alternative thought to focus our mind on, so that the unwanted idea disappears by itself.

2. Postpone thinking. While it may seem like a trivial solution, the truth is that setting a time to think about the concerns that are bothering us works. In this way we will at least prevent them from persecuting us day and night. The strategy is very simple: instead of getting angry when we come up with an unwanted idea, we should simply say to ourselves: "I'll think about it soon, when I'm done with what I'm doing". In this way we reduce the emotional impact, and this will ensure that it does not fix itself more strongly in our consciousness.

3. Exhibition. According to Wegner, if we allow ourselves to think in a controlled way about what we want to avoid, the content will be less likely to reappear in our minds. In this way we will deactivate the mechanism of constant self-examination reactivated by the unwanted idea, at the same time we will be able to minimize its emotional impact by becoming familiar with it.

4. Reduce multitasking. A Flinders University study concluded that "cognitive load appears to undermine the suppressive capacity of thought," so we experience more intrusions. This means that when we are mentally overworked, full of responsibility, overwhelmed and stressed, unwanted thoughts are more likely to continually appear in our consciousness. Reducing the pace of our daily life, therefore, would help us avoid the rebound effect.

5. Mindfluness meditation. In part, unwanted thoughts are intensely fixed by the negative emotions they generate. With mindfulness meditation , not only do we gain greater mental control, but we learn not to give so much importance to those thoughts because we know that if we don't hold on to them, they will go away as they came. In fact, an experiment conducted at the University of Washington found that midfulness meditation is an effective technique for avoiding unwanted thoughts about alcohol and helping people reduce alcohol consumption.

Sources:

Erskine, J. & Georgiou, G. (2010) Effects of Thought Suppression on Eating Behavior in Restrained and Non-Restrained Eaters. Appetite; 54 (3): 499-503.

Erskine, J. et. Al. (2010) I Suppress, Therefore I Smoke: Effects of Thought Suppression on Smoking Behavior. Psychol Sci; 21 (9): 1225-30.

Nixon, R. et. Al. (2009) The Influence of Thought Suppression and Cognitive Load on Intrusions and Memory Processes Following an Analogue Stressor. Behav Ther; 40 (4): 368-379.

Bowen, s. et. Al. (2007) The role of thought suppression in the relation between mindfulness meditation and alcohol use. Addict Behav; 32 (10): 2324-2328.

Taylor, F., & Bryant, RA (2007) The tendency to suppress, inhibiting thoughts, and dream rebound. Behavior Research and Therapy; 45 (1): 163-168. 

Wegner, D. et. Al. (2004) Dream rebound: The return of suppressed thought and dream. Psychological Science; 15 (4): 232-236.

Wegner, DM et. Al. (1987) Paradoxical Effects of Thought Suppression. J Pers Soc Psychol; 53 (1): 5-13.