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A comment on Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental health after all. Parent comment

Re:Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental heal... by vasco on Friday September 22, 2023 @02:39AM (#37608661)
A negative thought is just a thought, it's not like you need to actively not take care of things. But if you find yourself thinking about death, or about how much your childhood sucked, or that you're good for nothing, you don't need to address anything about those thoughts.

The least time you spend on them the better, nothing good comes from dwelling.

I can't understand people that want to re-live or push through some negative thoughts "because it'll get better eventually". To me it seems like you're just making yourself numb, and it's got to be at the expense or something. You become so beaten down from them they don't hurt you anymore. I'd rather just not think about bad stuff, they come my away and I go away from them and that's it. Why go through a long road when there's an immediate escape hatch?

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Re:Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental heal... by zozbot234 on Friday September 22, 2023 @07:20AM (#37610556)
> But if you find yourself thinking about death, or about how much your childhood sucked, or that you're good for nothing, you don't need to address anything about those thoughts.

> The least time you spend on them the better, nothing good comes from dwelling.

Negative visualization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_visualization is absolutely a thing. If you do it properly (aiming towards psychological resilience and gratitude for the things one actually has) it can work quite well.

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Re:Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental heal... by vasco on Friday September 22, 2023 @10:58AM (#37612914)
Of course it exists, I described it in my comment. Look at this quote from wikipedia and compare it to my example of preparing for your parents to die:

> Unlike the general focus of creative visualization of inducing an imaginary positive psychological and physiologic response, negative visualization focuses on training the practitioner on the negative outcomes of realistic life scenarios to desensitize or create psychological fitness in preparation for real-life losses

Something existing and some people thinking it is a good idea doesn't mean it is. I'm not saying I'm right either, I'm sharing what I do and what I think. And what I think is that negative visualization is ridiculous. Live your life, bad things will happen anyway, why do you want to be sad in advance just to maybe be a little bit less sad later? I can't take this idea seriously, it's like someone who doesn't want to love for fear of getting a broken heart.

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Re:Suppressing negative thoughts may be good for mental heal... by hamster77 on Sunday September 24, 2023 @12:52PM (#37634801)
As someone just now learning I have been negative visualizing since childhood, I’ll tell you it’s not a choice exactly. The thoughts just come to you (someone is going to die, I’m going to die, etc.)… sometimes I’m successful at knocking the thought out of my head quickly. Other times I dwell for a few minutes, having a mini-grieving session thinking what I would do in the situation. It passes and I go back to present life where you don’t think about these things at all. I don’t know if it’s something innate that I got used to and I subconsciously need to do for some reason (and perhaps others do not)… not sure how much more resilient I’ll be if/when anything terrible happens, so agree not sure if best use of time
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