On Repeat

About fifteen years ago, I laughed at a funeral.

I was nervous, and somehow that nervousness came out as laughter. The moment I felt it starting, I knew how bad it would look. That only made me more aware of it. I tried to hold it in, which made the whole thing worse. There was nothing funny about where I was or why everyone was there, but my body had chosen possibly the worst response available.

That has never stopped my brain from bringing it back.

Every few years, usually when I am trying to fall asleep, there it is again. The funeral. The laugh. The immediate awareness of how awful it must have looked.

I wish I could forget it. When it comes back, I usually try to push it away and think about something else.

Everyone else involved has almost certainly forgotten it. Fifteen years have passed. I have had plenty of genuinely important things happen since. But the memory still finds its way back to me.

What old memory still makes you wince?

In 1987, psychologist Daniel Wegner asked people to spend five minutes trying not to think about a white bear.

They were told to say whatever came into their minds and ring a bell whenever the bear appeared anyway. It appeared often enough that the room kept filling with bells.

Then Wegner changed the instruction. The participants were now allowed to think about the bear. Those who had first tried to suppress it mentioned the bear more often than people who had been allowed to think about it from the beginning. In the original experiment, trying not to think about something seemed to make it easier for that thought to return later.

Wegner later proposed ironic process theory to explain why.

When we try to keep a thought out of mind, one mental process looks for something else to focus on. At the same time, another keeps checking whether the unwanted thought has slipped back in.

That second process has a strange job. It has to keep searching for the thing we are trying not to find.

Most of the time, the two processes can work together. But the first takes more effort. When we are tired, distracted or under pressure, it becomes harder to keep our attention somewhere else while the monitoring continues.

That can make the unwanted thought unusually easy to notice.

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The effect has limits.

A 2020 meta-analysis of 31 studies found that people did not generally think about the forbidden thought more while they were suppressing it. That immediate backfire appeared mainly when they were also under cognitive load.

The rebound afterward was more consistent. Once people stopped trying to suppress the thought, it tended to return more often.

So ironic process theory does not mean every unwanted thought becomes stronger the moment we try to avoid it. It describes a more specific problem: keeping watch for a thought can help keep that thought easy to find.

That matters because we do not always treat its return as just another thought passing through. Sometimes we take it personally.

Someone we used to love crosses our mind years later and the next thought is often about what that must mean. Maybe I am not over them.

An old embarrassment comes back and we wonder why we still care. Anxiety shows up before something we thought had become easier and suddenly our progress feels less certain.

We make the thought mean something about us.

But the research gives us another way to read that moment. A thought can remain easy to find after we have spent effort trying to control it. Its presence alone cannot tell us how much power it still has.

What happens after it arrives may be more revealing.

Does it change the afternoon? Does it change the decision? Does it pull us back into the same behaviour? Or does it pass through a mind that happens to remember? We remember the person and carry on with dinner. The embarrassment comes back and leaves a minute later. The anxiety appears and we still walk into the room.

A thought can remain familiar long after its place in our life has changed. Moving on may still include remembering.

^{This is a space for exploration and reflection, not medical, psychological, or therapeutic advice. Each reader’s situation is unique and deserves the right kind of support. If you are struggling or in crisis, please contact a licensed mental health professional. This edition contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, we may earn from qualifying purchases at no additional cost to you.}