If you have problems, I feel bad for you son
I just forget them
Top of the morning, sapien. Welcome to Common Sense Medicine, where I try and keep you up to date on the latest and greatest in longevity science.
This week, came back from India and jumped into a pretty demanding rotation. I’m not going to have much in the way of new updates, so I’m probably just going to focus on the nuts and bolts of the article this time around. Still getting into the gym 5x a week this week, even though I have call this weekend. Let’s jump into the article for this week.
Other items on the differential:
Have been reading a lot about personal finance this week. I think it’s interesting how much people spend on their health. I listened to this episode of the My First Million podcast with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri
I picked up an interesting book about the history of interest this week. I think it’s a good read for anyone interested how compound interest actually came to be. It’s always nice to see how getting 1% better every day compounds — because of this newsletter every week, I’m seeing the body of my written work expand and it’s pretty fun to write these articles.
THE WEEKLY DOSE
Dealing with problems? Forget them
Today, I wanted to discuss an article posted by Adam Grant — a psychology guru from the University of Pennsylvania who has written books about organizational psychology — on X. It mentioned that in order to deal with your problems, you should forget them and suppress the thought of them rather than confront them head on. It was a bold proposition, especially because a lot of mental health treatments involve facing your issues head on and / or exposure therapy, so naturally I was curious to know how this works.
The authors Mamat and Anderson had an observation that because of the exposure to the stressor, the intrusive thoughts that people had during the pandemic would come back even stronger, which is why they embarked on this investigation.1 As someone who prides himself on attacking problems head on and thinking about the challenges which I need to overcome, this was interesting to me for more reasons than one.
What did the researchers do?
This paper has a provocative thesis, so the investigators had to have a methadology which would test this observation. The researchers employed a robust experimental design, randomly assigning 120 adults from 16 countries to either suppress fearful thoughts (Suppress-Negative group) or neutral thoughts (Suppress-Neutral group). This controlled approach, with a 3-month follow-up, lends credibility to their findings and helps address potential concerns about the long-term impact of suppression.
The study found that suppressing fears led to significant reductions in vividness (p = 0.01) and affective responses (p < 0.001) compared to baseline events. Furthermore, participants in the Suppress-Negative group experienced greater improvement in mental health compared to the Suppress-Neutral group (p = 0.045). Importantly, suppressing fears significantly reduced the risk of worsening depression by 57.4% (p < 0.05) and decreased the risk of a decline in well-being by 44.2% (p < 0.05) relative to suppressing neutral events
The elephant in the room
While the study demonstrates the effectiveness of thought suppression training, it doesn't fully elucidate the underlying mechanisms. The authors hypothesize that it may involve a combination of inhibitory control mechanisms and fear extinction circuitry, but further research is needed to understand how suppression interacts with other cognitive processes and how it affects brain activity. The study also involved a relatively small sample size and focused on specific types of intrusive thoughts (fears). It's important to investigate whether these findings generalize to other populations and types of unwanted thoughts, such as rumination or obsessive thoughts.
While the 3-month follow-up showed promising results, with sustained reductions in depression (p < 0.001) for those who suppressed fears, longer-term studies are needed to assess the durability of the mental health benefits and to monitor for any potential adverse effects. For example, could sustained suppression lead to emotional avoidance or difficulty processing important emotions? There could be a negative effect in other areas of life, like emotional resilience as well.
The elephant that isn’t in the room
The second-order effect of this paper is that teaching people to avoid their problems isn’t a good recipe for disaster, I believe. I think that suppressing your problems might help in the short-term, but there will always be problems which are present, and part of the way to deal with that is to confront the problem head-on. However, I think there is some merit in working on suppression of thought for people with anxiety, because a large portion of those who are anxious about their lives are due to problems which may be magnified, and they may need suppression as a tool to develop emotional resilience.
Furthermore, the paper found that positive thinking did not help mental health as much as suppressing negative thinking, which is interesting because I’ve found this to be true as well. For every person who has told me to “think about the bright side” when I’m frustrated or upset, I’d think about the stressor that much more — lending credence to the idea that people who are depressed or have PTSD experience emotions when triggered by an external event.
I think psychologically, it is good to face your fears and realize that they are not as daunting as you had been scared about; I think that it’s also true that continually thinking about your problems can make you paralyzed and suppression can be of limited benefit when starting to confront those issues. So, as a short-term (<3 months) tool, I think suppression is positive, but you’d need to replace that with something that helps you confront the issue head on when you’re trying to transition to the next phase and dealing with the distressing thought.
I was debating whether to cover this paper this week, largely because I thought that the link between emotional resilience and longevity is pretty weak. However, if you think about it, keeping your mental health requires mindfulness about your consumption diet, and your stressors. I think that longevity sleeps on mental health largely because it’s very woo-woo, and there isn’t any biomarker panel to tell you that you are in a particular state of mind (i.e., happiness). At the end of the day, if suppression allows you to become happy, I’m not going to argue with that. For me personally, I’m still going to try and confront my problems head on rather than ignoring them.
THE PRESCRIPTION
Q1 2025: Hypertrophy Cycle Progress
The upshot: In the week that I was in India, I didn’t have a scale to measure my weight so I kept it constant. Coming back, was pleased to see that I only lost 0.2 lbs even though calorie tracking was difficult (basically survived on Peanut Butter and Fairlife milk throughout the vacation, but it turned out okay). This week, focusing on getting back to basics.
REMEMBER, IT’S JUST COMMON SENSE.
Thanks so much for reading! Let me know what you thought by replying to this email.
See you next week,
Shree (@shree_nadkarni)
The information provided here is not medical advice. This does not constitute a doctor patient relationship and this content is intended for entertainment, informational, and educational purposes only. Always consult with a doctor before starting new supplementation protocols.
Mamat Z, Anderson MC. Improving mental health by training the suppression of unwanted thoughts. Science Advances. 2023;9(38):eadh5292. doi:10.1126/sciadv.adh5292