The White Bear Experiment: Why Suppressing Thoughts Makes Them Stronger

There was a research conducted by a Social Psychologist, Daniel Wegner, where he gathered a few participants and asked them to not think about a White Bear. Yup, you read it right, he assembled them and the command was simply to not think about a White Bear.

He also mentioned that if you thought about the White Bear, you should try your best to suppress that thought.

What exactly happened was, almost all the participants thought about the White Bear. Plus, when they tried to suppress the thoughts, they ended up thinking about the White Bear even more frequently.

This is what they called the Rebound Effect, which refers to the paradox where the more we try to suppress our thoughts about something, the more they dominate our minds.

So there are actually a few lessons here:

1. We all are humans. We have some problems or issues that we are really deeply concerned about, but what we often do is try to ignore them, and say, “Oh no, the thoughts came again. Okay, let me try to find something else to do; I don’t want to think about this now.”
2. What actually happens is that the more you ignore them, the deeper those problems grow and become rooted in your thoughts. The more time you take to neglect them, the more they will…