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Thinking about parents or loved ones helps with depression
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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To protect yourself from unpleasant memories, put a photo of a loved one on your desktop: thoughts about parents or loved ones help cope with depression no worse than antidepressants.
Family photos on your desktop will help you beat stress, say psychologists from Cornell University (USA). During the experiment, scientists asked volunteers to remember some unpleasant episode from the past, and then think about a loved one. First, the subject had to remember how his mother once took care of him; in the second version of the experiment, he had to look at her photo; finally, in the third version of the experiment, after the unpleasant memory, he had to look at a photo of a loved one. As a control, they used photos of just acquaintances or even strangers.
It turned out that memories of loved ones help to cope with unpleasant thoughts faster and generally make a person less susceptible to negativity. A month after the experiment, those who looked at photos of their relatives and friends had fewer problems with psychological and physical well-being.
The scientists published their results in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. They had previously shown that such thoughts help relieve stress caused by external factors. But we ourselves can be a great source of stress for ourselves: our memory stores many unpleasant things - from failures in exams to failures on the love front. Constantly returning to unpleasant memories is fraught with the development of depression, anxiety disorders, and all this ultimately affects physical well-being, causing heart problems, etc.
To prevent this from happening, the authors of the work advise practicing pleasant memories, and not just pleasant ones, but those that remain from heartfelt communication with another person, which remind of friendship, love and harmony. Naturally, such moments are primarily associated with close relatives and a loved one (of course, this does not take into account exceptional cases of harsh family confrontations and mutual hatred after several decades of marriage).
In general, reader, in view of the next looming crisis, we advise you to fill your office desk as densely as possible with photos of husbands, wives and children. This is unlikely to prevent financial losses, but it may protect you from the accompanying stress.