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Thoughts of parents or loved ones help to cope with depression
Last reviewed: 16.10.2021
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To protect yourself from unpleasant memories, put on the desktop a photo of a person close to you: thoughts about parents or about your loved ones help to cope with depression no worse than antidepressants.
Family photos on the desktop will help you defeat stress, psychologists at Cornell University (USA) say. During the experiment, scientists asked the volunteers to recall some unpleasant episode from the past, and then think about a close person. At first the subject had to remember how his mother had once cared for him; in the second variant of the experiment he should have looked at her photo; Finally, in the third variant of the experiment, it was necessary to look after the unpleasant memory of a photo of a loved one. As the control used pictures of just acquaintances or even strangers.
It turned out that the memories of close people help to quickly cope with unpleasant thoughts and generally make a person less susceptible to negativity. A month after the experiment, those who looked at photos of relatives and friends had fewer problems with psychological and physical well-being.
The results were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Previously, they managed to show that such thoughts help to relieve stress caused by external causes. But we ourselves can be an excellent source of stress for ourselves: our memory stores many unpleasant things - from failures in examinations to failures on the love front. Constant return to unpleasant memories is fraught with the development of depression, anxiety disorders, and all this ultimately affects the physical health, causing problems with the heart, etc.
To prevent this from happening, the authors of the work advise to practice in pleasant memories, and not just pleasant ones, but in those who stayed from emotional communication with another person, which remind us of friendship, love and harmony. Naturally, such moments are primarily connected with the closest relatives and the beloved person (of course, in this case, exceptional cases of harsh family confrontations and mutual hatred after several decades of marriage are not taken into account).
In general, the reader, in view of the next impending crisis, advise you how to thicken the office table with photos of husbands, wives and children. Financial losses are unlikely to prevent, but from the accompanying stress can be saved.