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The Book in One Sentence
- You can change your moods by learning how to restructure your negative thoughts.
The Five Big Ideas
- Your moods are created by your thoughts.
- Thoughts that are dominated by pervasive negativity cause depression.
- The negative thoughts which cause depression nearly always contain gross, cognitive distortions.
- There are 10 cognitive distortions that twist your thinking.
- The most usual mental distortion to look out for when you are feeling worthless is all-or-nothing thinking.
Feeling Good Summary
Cognitive therapy is founded on three principles:
- Your moods are created by your “cognitions,” or thoughts.” A cognition refers to the way you look at things— your perceptions, mental attitudes, and beliefs. It includes the way you interpret things— what you say about something or someone to yourself. You feel the way you do right now because of the thoughts you are thinking at this moment.
- When you are feeling depressed, your thoughts are dominated by pervasive negativity.
- The negative thoughts which cause your emotional turmoil nearly always contain gross distortions. Although these thoughts appear valid, they are irrational or just plain wrong, and that twisted thinking is a major cause of your suffering.
“Every bad feeling you have is the result of distorted negative thinking. Illogical pessimistic attitudes play the central role in the development and continuation of all your symptoms.”
“Every time you feel depressed about something, try to identify a corresponding negative thought you had just prior to and during the depression. Why? Because these thoughts have actually created your bad mood, by learning to restructure them, you can change your mood.”
“Your emotions result entirely from the way you look at things.”
Cognitive Distortions
- All-or-Nothing Thinking. You evaluate your personal qualities in extreme, black-or-white categories. All-or-nothing thinking forms the basis for perfectionism. It causes you to fear any mistake or imperfection because you will then see yourself as a complete loser. This makes you feel inadequate and worthless. The technical name for this type of perceptual error is “dichotomous thinking.”
- Overgeneralization. You arbitrarily conclude that one thing that happened to you once will occur over and over again. The pain of rejection is generated almost entirely from overgeneralization.
- Mental Filter. You pick out a negative detail in any situation and dwell on it exclusively, thus perceiving that the whole situation is negative. When you are depressed, you wear a pair of eyeglasses with special lenses that filter out anything positive. All that you allow to enter your conscious mind is negative. Because you are not aware of this “filtering process,” you conclude that everything is negative. The technical name for this process is “selective abstraction.” It is a bad habit that can cause you to suffer much needless anguish.
- Disqualifying the Positive. You transform neutral or even positive experiences into negative ones. Burns calls this, “reverse alchemy.” Disqualifying the positive is one of the most destructive forms of cognitive distortion.
- Jumping to Conclusions. When you jump to conclusions, you arbitrarily jump to a negative conclusion that is not justified by the facts of the situation. Two examples of jumping to conclusion are “mind reading” and “the fortune teller error.”
- Mind Reading. You assume that other people look down on you, and you’re so convinced about this that you don’t even bother to check it out.
- Fortune Telling. You imagine something bad is about to happen, and take this prediction as a fact even though it is unrealistic.
- Magnification and Minimization. When you magnify, you look at your errors, fears, or imperfections and exaggerate their importance. This has also been called “catastrophizing” because you turn commonplace negative events into nightmarish monsters. When you minimize, you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny such as your own desirable qualities or others’ imperfections. This is also called the “binocular trick”.
- Emotional Reasoning. You take your emotions as evidence for the truth. Your logic: “I feel like a dud, therefore I am a dud.” This kind of reasoning is misleading because your feelings reflect your thoughts and beliefs.
- Should Statements. You try to motivate yourself by saying, “I should do this” or “I must do that.”
- Labeling and Mislabeling. Labeling refers to your tendency to create a completely negative self-image based on your errors. Mislabeling refers to your tendency to describe an event with words that are inaccurate and emotionally heavily loaded.
- Personalization. You assume responsibility for a negative event when there is no basis for doing so.
“Your thoughts create your emotions; therefore, your emotions cannot prove that your thoughts are accurate.”
Dr. Aaron Beck said a depressed self-image can be characterized by the four D’s:
- Defeat
- Defection
- Desertion
- Deprivation
“Only your own sense of self-worth determines how you feel.”
“The most usual mental distortion to look out for when you are feeling worthless is all-or-nothing thinking.”
How to Boost Self-Esteem
1. Talk Back to That Internal Critic
- Train yourself to recognize and write down the self-critical thoughts as they go through your mind;
- Learn why these thoughts are distorted; and
- Practice talking back to them so as to develop a more realistic self-evaluation system.
2. Use “The Triple-Column Technique”
“When you have a negative thought, ask yourself, “What thoughts are going through my mind right now? What am I saying to myself? Why is this upsetting me?”
3. Use Mental Biofeedback
“Monitor your negative thoughts with a wrist counter. Click the button each time a negative thought crosses your mind. Then, at the end of the day, note your daily score and write it down in a log book.”
Notes Cont.
“When you are down on yourself, ask what you actually mean when you try to define your true identity with a negative label such as ‘a fool,’ ‘a sham,’ ‘a stupid dope,’ etc.”
“Once you begin to pick destructive labels apart, you will find they are arbitrary and meaningless. They actually cloud the issue, creating confusion and despair. Once rid of them, you can define and cope with any real problems that exist.”
When you are upset:
- Zero in on those automatic negative thoughts and write them down;
- Read over the list of ten cognitive distortions. Learn precisely how you are twisting things and blowing them out of proportion; and
- Substitute a more objective thought that puts the lie to the one which made you look down on yourself.
“Your feelings result from the meaning you give to the event, not from the event itself.”
Editor’s Note
Burns quotes Stoic philosopher Epictetus at the beginning of the book: “Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.”
To learn more about Epictetus, and in particular, Stoicism, I recommend reading, A Guide to The Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine.
“Irrational should statements rest on your assumption that you are entitled to instant gratification at all times.”
The following two guidelines will help you to determine when your anger is productive and when it is not.
- Is my anger directed toward someone who has knowingly, intentionally, and unnecessarily acted in a hurtful manner?
- Is my anger useful? Does it help me achieve a desired goal or does it simply defeat me?
“If you have a ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ rule that has been causing you disappointment and frustration, rewrite it in more realistic terms.
Replace ‘should’ with ‘it would be nice if.’”
“You’re not entitled to get what you want just because you want it.”
“Remorse or regret are aimed at behavior, whereas guilt is targeted toward the ‘self.’”
“Sadness is a normal emotion created by realistic perceptions that describe a negative event involving loss or disappointment in an undistorted way. Depression is an illness that always results from thoughts that are distorted in some way.”
“When a genuinely negative event occurs, your emotions will be created exclusively by your thoughts and perceptions. Your feelings will result from the meaning you attach to what happens. A substantial portion of your suffering will be due to the distortions in your thoughts. When you eliminate these distortions, you will find that coping with the ‘real problem’ will become less painful.”
“Although your distorted negative thoughts will be substantially reduced or entirely eliminated after you have recovered from a bout of depression, there are certain ‘silent assumptions’ that probably still lurk in your mind. These silent assumptions explain in large part why you became depressed in the first place and can help you predict when you might again be vulnerable.”
“A silent assumption is an equation with which you define your personal worth. It represents your value system, your personal philosophy, the stuff on which you base your self-esteem.”
If you feel moody, choose an activity, and instead of aiming for 100 percent, try for 80 percent, 60 percent, or 40 percent. Then see how much you enjoy the activity and how productive you become.
“You are wrong in your belief that suicide is the only solution or the best solution to your problem.”
“When you think that you are trapped and hopeless, your thinking is illogical, distorted, and skewed.”
“Nearly all suicidal patients have in common an illogical sense of hopelessness and the conviction they are facing an insoluble dilemma. Once you expose the distortions in your thinking, you will experience considerable emotional relief.”
“Your feelings of hopelessness and total despair are just symptoms of depressive illness, not facts.”
Burns lets the following rule of thumb guide him: People who feel hopeless neveractually are hopeless.
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