After read­ing this roundup of research into the psy­chol­ogy of thought sup­pres­sion you will see that the results are fairly con­clu­sive: it’s counter-productive in almost every circumstance.

From research into sub­stance crav­ings, so-called ‘intru­sive’ mem­o­ries, and even depres­sion, thought sup­pres­sion has been shown to not work and the act of remem­ber­ing when attempt­ing to sup­press has been dubbed the ‘post-suppression rebound effect’. The arti­cle con­cludes with:

The irony of thought sup­pres­sion, then, is that actively try­ing to man­age our own minds can some­times do more harm than good. Although it makes per­fect intu­itive sense to try and sup­press unwanted thoughts, unfor­tu­nately the very process we use to do this con­tains the seeds of its own destruc­tion. The more we try and push intru­sive thoughts down, the more they pop back up, stronger than ever.

via Mind Hacks