How to quickly forget your ex: three strategies to change forced thinking

Once this question is raised, it basically means that you have to abolish it.

Of course, it's not that you can't forget the person you loved deeply, but how fast should you forget? A day, a week or a month?

According to Freud's theory, "repression" can never solve the problem.

The more you control, the more out of control. Trying not to think about something is probably the main reason why we keep thinking about it.

The researchers did an experiment to see what would happen if an idea was suppressed.

They asked college students to look at nude photos of women, some of them looked at them normally, while others were asked to recall "memories about their father and mother" (too many ~) before looking at the photos.

Then, the researchers measured the skin conductance level of two groups of people. The skin conductance level can reflect the degree of excitement of the subject, and the increase of conductance level means that the body is awakened, that is to say, it feels excited.

It was found that the group who missed their parents had a higher level of skin conductance after seeing the photos. Does this mean that as long as they are depressed, they will bring a higher degree of arousal?

The researchers then conducted another set of experiments. They ask college students to think or not to think about an idea. There are two kinds of ideas, one is the less exciting idea of "weather" and the other is the exciting idea of "sex".

Those college students who are assigned to think about "sex" have no special awakening reaction when it comes to "sex", and everything is normal; It is normal for college students who are asked to suppress their thoughts about "weather" to mention "weather";

Only those college students who are asked not to think about sex, as long as they mention sex, will cause the skin conductance level to rise rapidly.

This shows that less exciting ideas, even if suppressed, will not cause strong awakening; The combination of stimulating "ideas" and "repression" can directly turn ideas into atomic bombs! ?

Sex is not terrible, what is terrible is excessive repression; In the same way, it is not terrible to miss your predecessor, but to strongly demand that you "don't want your predecessor".

It can make you completely ignore the root cause of breaking up, forget the deep harm ta has done to you, and successfully trigger a wake-up response, just like falling into some obsessive-compulsive disorder that can't forget your ex.

Daniel Wei Gena became an expert in compulsive thinking because of a short story he happened to see.

Tolstoy, a great writer, was asked by his brother to stand there without thinking about a white bear. As a result, everyone can think that he can't help thinking about the white bear.

Daniel began to study why people can't resist some ideas, even the meaningless ideas of white bears.

In the book White Bear Experiment-How to Overcome Obsessive-compulsive Thinking, he summarized the core characteristics of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and obsessive-compulsive thinking, namely "unwanted thoughts".

Unwanted thoughts may be white bears, predecessors, or any thoughts that reason, morality, values and so on require us not to think.

Darwin said, "The highest stage that human beings can achieve in moral cultivation is when we realize that we want to control our own thoughts", but when we excessively "control our own thoughts", compulsion will appear.

Darwin himself was not spared. He always tears a thick book in half, thinking that this is the only way to carry it.

Why are "unwanted thoughts" so hard to get rid of?

Any compulsion must consist of two opposite concepts, which we will call A and -A for the time being.

A is a natural idea, such as I miss my ex.

A is the antonym of a, for example, I can't think about my predecessor.

We hope that the sum of the two is equal to zero, as if nothing had happened, and we can move on intact.

So you tell yourself that you can't watch the dynamics of ta any more, and you have to hack TA; Warn yourself that ta is a scum, and it is not worth thinking about at all.

And the result?

You can't help but brush every place where ta may leave a mark over and over again, and then you can't help adding it back after it is hacked.

The more I tell myself that I can't think about ta anymore, the more I can't help thinking about ta.

Because A and -A have quietly established a strong connection, -A strengthens the existence of A, just like A and -A combine to give birth to a child B, which is called "compulsion". ?

To form compulsion, both the ideas of A and -A are indispensable. This means that as long as one of them is missing, coercion will no longer be established.

"The only way to get rid of temptation is to give in to it. If you resist it, your soul will become weak with the desire of forbidden things. " (Oscar Wilde)

For the exciting strong instinct, repression is the catalyst to promote the outbreak; It is a natural way to "yield" to instinct and accept reality.

Think about your predecessor. Sometimes, the only way to end a road is to finish it.

Therefore, some people will take the way of "mourning" to fully release the "sadness" of lovelorn love, cry, drink too much, have no intention to wash and dress, do not work or study, and lie in the mud pond until they have had enough;

Others use the method of "doing" to fully vent the "anger" of lovelorn love, questioning, fighting, insulting, stalking, harassing and fighting until they are exhausted.

These two methods will work sooner or later, and letting nature take its course is the first way to change forced thinking.

Of course, this is for normal people, and for some paranoid or mentally retarded people, "doing" may lead to bloody cases.

Just like Alex in the movie "Fatal Temptation", it is not uncommon for a man to lose everything because he refuses to let go of an extramarital affair.

Marvin Minsky, one of the pioneers in the field of artificial intelligence, has an understanding of "stop theory".

He believes that most of the time programmers spend on computers is not writing programs, but debugging and removing logical contradictions that programs can't do.

"Extra ideas" in the program means that the program can't run normally.

If you don't want to be immersed in the "fault" for too long, you can shorten the long process through scientific methods. Here are three strategies to solve compulsive thinking.

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Change the background

When people are lovelorn, divorced, or their loved ones have passed away, many people will say that they forgot when they left this environment. Is it true?/You don't say.

Daniel gave an example of "quitting smoking" in the book. A man was hospitalized with stomach trouble. He took this opportunity to give up smoking.

A few years later, when he went to that hospital again, he suddenly had a strong feeling of wanting to smoke, just like when he had just given up smoking.

Why is there such an effect? The reason may be that when we think about something, we always have some connection with environmental clues.

Necker cube is a strange phenomenon noticed by cognitive psychologists. This cube has one feature: reversible perspective.

When you see it, you may first see the lower side (the shaded side of box B) or the upper side (the shaded side of box C).

It's totally two directions, but you can turn it around visually to make it look different.

This seems to show that every idea we have has two opposite sides, which may be positive, negative, negative or positive, just like A and-A. 。

The way to change this reversible perspective is to set a background for them. When the necker cube is placed in a larger background, it is confined to a certain direction.

Only when an idea is introduced into a certain background will it tend to be stable.

In one experiment, participants were asked to suppress the idea of "thinking about white bear" before expressing it, and in the process, they were also asked to watch a slide alone.

A group of participants saw the same slide in the process of repression and expression: "classroom background" slide.

Another group of subjects watched the slide of "classroom background" when their thoughts were suppressed, and watched the slide of "household appliances background" when they expressed.

Participants who introduced the new background "household appliances" successfully got rid of the usual "rebound effect".

This is due to the intentional setting of the experiment, and the slide became the background clue of the idea of "thinking about white bears"; When the background changes, the thinking clues about the white bear are deleted, so the idea is not so easy to extract.

The changing background has successfully played the role of "self-distraction".

This can also explain why people can give up drinking in the "alcohol center" but not at home. So it's really a good choice to travel after being lovelorn ~

watch out for

When children cry, adults often use the method of persuasion. For example, children obviously want a balloon, but adults say, look, there is a puppy!

Children's attention is limited, and they forget balloons when they see puppies, but can distraction play a role in adults and really important things?

Not thinking, not feeling, not being, and using substitutes to solve problems are essentially an escape. When the problem is really serious, the self-distraction strategy can only play a certain role at the beginning.

In the end, the problem will still appear, and even become more stubborn because of repeated interference.

If we try our best not to feel or do anything, it will also destroy our mental devices, give priority to "unwanted thoughts", and lead to "mental retardation", getting farther and farther away from our true selves and no longer growing.

When we are lovelorn, we are more concerned about:

But rarely noticed:

For important problems, a better strategy is "attention" rather than "distraction". Paying attention to the essence of the problem and not escaping is the really effective strategy.

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Relax your body.

An eight-month study of 200 high school girls shows that people who exercise regularly are less likely to report illness when they encounter pressure such as love breakdown.

The more civilized people are, the more accustomed they are to ignoring the influence of the body on us and paying too much attention to mind control.

When we are all nervous and want to resist an idea, it just won't disappear; Perhaps only when you welcome it as quickly as a toy child and get tired of it will you naturally throw it away.

People who are used to anxiety and compulsion are also in a state of tension.

If possible, it is best to set aside a period of relaxation every day. You can do yoga, breathing exercises, meditation or meditation, and any activities that can help you relax.

Do you think you will still have the strength to hate your ex at this time, just after taking a hot spring bath and letting a beautiful man (or beauty, depending on your gender) do a full-body massage?

(except those who have been in hot springs with their predecessors, similar backgrounds may lead to an atomic bomb explosion ~)

You will find that when the body is really relaxed, those disturbing thoughts will not wake you up so easily.

end

Author | Ba Duanjin, author of Psychological Recommendation, reading promoter, master of educational psychology.

He has published two monographs on psychology, from architects to columnists and lecturers, and has been committed to making psychology popular science true, effective and easy to understand. He likes reading books on psychology, so that everyone can learn psychology easily, grow up and pay attention to topics such as "know yourself" and "good relationship".

This is my "Reading Psychology Books" series. If you read it, please like it to encourage me ~