Sometimes, especially when we are trying to dismiss thoughts from our minds, it can feel like we aren't on the same team. The more you try not to think about it, the more it is there. Even if you get practice suppressing the unwanted thought, that doesn't seem to work in the long-term either. Trying to push it to the back of your mind just - does - not - work. Thought suppression has behavioural impacts too. In one experiment, people asked not to think about chocolate ended up eating more chocolate when given the opportunity than those who weren't given the instruction to suppress the thought.

One theory to explain this is that we try to distract ourselves by intentionally thinking about something else. Secondly - and here comes the ironic bit -  out minds start an unconscious monitoring process to check if we are still thinking about the thing we are not supposed to be thinking about - you know, to check if our conscious process is working or not.  The problem comes when we consciously stop trying to distract ourselves and the unconscious process carries on looking out for the thing we are trying to suppress. Anything it sees that looks remotely like the target triggers the thought again and round we go in yet another loop of thinking the same thought we were desperately trying to forget about.

So, the irony of thought suppression, then, is that actively trying to manage our own minds can sometimes do more harm than good.