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Susannah Mary Leopold's avatar

Great article, thank you! Do you see any difficulties with equating thoughts that an external person has told you not to think with actual intrusive thoughts as when a personal has a clinical OCD diagnosis? Or are the mechanisms close enough here?

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Erman Misirlisoy, PhD's avatar

That's a great point. There are some differences between self-generated vs externally instructed actions and action suppression (something I studied during my PhD), and it's likely a similar distinction applies to thoughts too. The only way to know for sure how much that matters in this thought suppression context would be to test it. But naturally, studying thoughts is challenging enough in the lab!

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Susannah Mary Leopold's avatar

Thanks for your answer! I'm guessing you'd almost need participants to have similar kinds of intrusive thoughts to able to reach any sort of conclusion so it would be incredibly difficult to test. Your PhD sounds fascinating!

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MsGabriel's avatar

Thank you

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Dr. Catherine Darley's avatar

Terrific article! I wish everyone knew the immediate effects of poor sleep on our ability to think well. Hopefully that knowledge would help people feel comfortable taking the time they need to sleep well.

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