The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It

UNDER THE MICROSCOPE: INVESTIGATING IRONIC
REBOUND
Is there something you try to keep out of your mind? If so, examine the theory of ironic rebound.
Does suppression work? Or does trying to push something out of your mind make it come back
stronger? (Yes, you are going to give the monitor the job of monitoring the monitor.)

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AVOIDING IRONIC REBOUND
How can you find your way out of this confounding dilemma? Wegner suggests an antidote to ironic
rebound that is, itself, ironic: Give up. When you stop trying to control unwanted thoughts and
emotions, they stop controlling you. Studies of brain activation confirm that as soon as you give
participants permission to express a thought they were trying to suppress, that thought becomes less
primed and less likely to intrude into conscious awareness. Paradoxically, permission to think a
thought reduces the likelihood of thinking it.
This solution turns out to be useful for a surprisingly wide range of unwanted inner experiences.
The willingness to think what you think and feel what you feel—without necessarily believing that it
is true, and without feeling compelled to act on it—is an effective strategy for treating anxiety,
depression, food cravings, and addiction. As we consider the evidence for each, we’ll see that giving
up control of our inner experiences gives us greater control over our outer actions.

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I DON’T WANT TO FEEL THIS WAY
Can trying not to think sad thoughts make people depressed? It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds.
Studies show that the more you try to suppress negative thoughts, the more likely you are to become
depressed. The more depressed people try to block out distressing thoughts, the more depressed they
get. One of Wegner’s first thought-suppression experiments showed this effect even in perfectly
healthy subjects. He asked people to either think about the worst things that have happened to them, or
to 
not
think about those things. When people are stressed out or distracted, trying not to think sad
thoughts makes them even sadder than when they are 
trying
to feel sad. Another experiment found that
when people try to push away self-critical thoughts (“I’m such a loser,” “People think I’m stupid”),
their self-esteem and mood plummet faster than when people openly contemplate such thoughts. This
is true 
even when people think they have succeeded at pushing the negative thoughts away
. Ironic
rebound strikes again!
Trying to suppress anxiety also backfires. For example, people who try not to think about a painful
medical procedure end up feeling more anxious and have more intrusive thoughts about the pain.
People who try to suppress their fear before giving a public speech not only feel more anxious, but
also have higher heart rates (and are therefore more likely to blow the big talk). We may try to push
thoughts out of our minds, but the body gets the message anyway. And just as trying to suppress sad
and self-critical thoughts makes depression worse, studies show that thought suppression increases
the symptoms of serious anxiety disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive-
compulsive disorder.
These findings can be hard to wrap our heads around. They go against every instinct we have to
protect our minds from disturbing thoughts. What are we supposed to do with harmful thoughts if not
get rid of them? But as we’ll see, if we want to save ourselves from mental suffering, we need to
make peace with those thoughts, not push them away.

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