Has it ever happened to you that a person keeps popping into your head even when you’re not trying to think about them? You can be busy with work or distracted by other things, but they still cross your mind. And then it starts happening often enough that you start noticing it instead of brushing it off.
The thing is that this sometimes happens without any obvious feelings for the person in question. And even if you try to figure out why they keep coming back to your mind, there is not always an obvious reason.
This can be related to how things ended, or didn’t
Psychology may have the answer of why a person keeps coming back to your mind. Back in the 1920s, psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik noticed something interesting while observing waiters in a café in Vienna. They could remember every detail of orders they were working on without writing anything down. But as soon as the bill was paid, they forgot everything.
In lab experiments, Zeigarnik discovered that people are likely to remember unfinished tasks almost twice as well as finished ones. This phenomenon is known as the Zeigarnik Effect, and it shows that unfinished tasks are a source of mental tension that keeps them in your mind.
And it’s not just household chores that get stuck in your mind, but people too. That’s where cognitive dissonance comes in. This phenomenon was first discovered by Leon Festinger in the 1950s. It occurs when reality doesn’t live up to your expectations. For example, your friend suddenly stops responding to your messages, or your relationship ends without any reason. Your mind is aware of the discrepancy and keeps dwelling on it.
You are Trying Too Hard to Forget Someone
When we try not to think about something or someone and do our best to oppress our thoughts, it’s exactly then that our mind turns to the thing or the person we try to forget. This phenomenon is also described by psychology, and probably one of the most famous research done on this is the one by social psychologist Daniel Wegner.
Namely, Wegner did an experiment in which he asked participants not to think about a white bear and asked them to ring a bell whenever that thought crossed their mind. The results showed just what he expected. The more the participants tried not to think of a white bear, the more they actually thought about it.
So, when you wonder why something keeps popping up in your thoughts, think of how your brain works when it comes to suppression.
When you try to suppress a thought, two things happen simultaneously. One is your conscious attempt to distract yourself from the thought. This is where you fill your head with anything but the thought you are not to supposed to think of. The other is an automatic monitoring system that is constantly checking to see if the thought has crept back into your head. The problem with this monitoring system is that it has to keep the thing you’re trying to suppress in mind, which ironically keeps bringing it back to the forefront.
The same goes to people. You keep thinking of someone not because you lack willpower but simply because your brain is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do when it comes to suppressing thoughts
