Pssst! Try not to think of a white bear...bet you can't!

I recently came across this concept...trying "not to think about a white bear". Try it. Go ahead...try not to think about a white bear...

It is like...trying not to think of "popcorn and coke" (which I 'love') at the movies...or ...______...fill in the blank - of something that you really find pleasant, or unpleasant...; bet you can't.

There was this article in Salon.com written by David Adam, about the effects of obsessive thinking, and processing, that - especially when under duress or stress, becomes very difficult to leave aside. Adam wrote the book “The Man Who Couldn’t Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought” which captured my interest, for lots of energy is invested in quieting the inner voice or voices, which I have started calling the "penthouse dweller", the inner voice that repeats, or counts the steps as you go up-the-stairs, or suggests and reprimands, or critiques what-to-do-when, or asks "what-If-you-had...or "you said the wrong thing", "you were not "nice", or "should not have done that that way", etc., etc., .etc., ..etc., ...etc., etcéteraaaa! Aaaaggghhhh!

One strategy has been that of thinking of something else: i.e., diverting one's attention to another 'object'. But that takes energy and work. And if one were to check if the "bear" is still there, in doing the checking, one just thought about the bear...again! It - the bear - has been there all the time!

Take for example a pressing problem, time-wise, that is. Something of urgency. (Note that it might not be important, though...yet...). But it is pressing; it is piling up on pressure. Say something like, paying a debt by such-a-such time, or making a decision that has some important consequence, or consequences. It is hard to "not think" of the impending time - "deadline" - for the decision to be made. The fluttering of thoughts, processing in the 'control room' goes something like this: "And what if...?; What about the consequences? What if I am not able to...what if I make the wrong choice...or..? There's no way out..."and after the decision is made,  while waiting for the consequences to occur, or the next shoe to drop, "the voice" is in crisis mode, and "r_e_s_t" is just not possible!

http://tinyurl.com/phok5ah

Can you relate?

The article describes this reality of thought suppression much better. Or should I say, "attempting" thought suppression. Check it out in the title link above or here.

The mechanism for "the workings" of the phenomenon is so well put by Adam, I am quoting it here:

What’s going on? According to theories of how the mind works, the white bear effect is down to two mental processes. First, people who try not to think of the white bear must choose to think of something else, and so they introduce and employ a conscious distraction: thinking about what they had for breakfast, for instance. But before we can introduce a distraction, we must know there is a target to distract ourselves from. So, before we can suppress a thought, we must scan our conscious mind to see if it is there. And to do this, we must think of what we want to look for – the white bear – which is the target that we don’t want to think of. 

Second, a separate process begins to make sure that the target, the unwanted thought of a white bear, is not present. While this second, monitoring, task is automatic, an unconscious routine that takes little work, the same is not true for the distraction, the thought suppression. That takes real effort, and so cannot last. If the monitoring process lingers after the distraction process has ended, and psychologists think it does, then our minds will continue to search for it. And this means we will find the unwanted thought more frequently than if we had never tried to suppress it in the first place.

So. What to do? Like, nothing?

Nothing...nothing?

Is this saying...not to repress an unwanted thought? Really? (But what about...the Cathechism, and its teachings...? "You shall have no 'bad' thoughts"...(or something like that...). Trap? Am I trapped? Are you?

I think I need to reread Adam's work. Adam's work...Adam's work...Adams work...Adamswork, adamswork...admanswrk...adsmwrok...amswork...ad......rk...