for certain what another person is thinking, so you’re wise to pour salt on your negative assumptions. Stand back and take a look at all the evidence on hand. Take control of your tendency to mind-read by trying the following:
Generate some alternative reasons for what you see. The person you’re chatting with may be tired, be preoccupied with his own thoughts or just have spotted someone he knows.
Consider that your guesses may be wrong. Are your fears really about your boss’s motives, or do they concern your own insecurity about your abilities at work? Do you have enough information or hard evidence to conclude that your boss thinks your work is substandard? Does it follow logically that ‘consider booking time off’ means ‘you’re getting the sack’?
Get more information (if appropriate). Ask your neighbour whether your dog kept him up all night, and talk to your vet about ways to calm your pet next time the moon waxes.
Emotional Reasoning: Reminding Yourself That Feelings Aren’t Facts
Surely we’re wrong about this one. Surely your feelings are real hard evidence of the way things are? Actually, no! Often, relying too heavily on your feelings as a guide leads you off the reality path. Here are some examples of emotional reasoning:
Your partner has been spending long nights at the office with a co-worker for the past month. You feel jealous and suspicious of your partner. Based on these feelings, you conclude that your partner’s having an affair with his co-worker.
You feel guilty out of the blue. You conclude that you must have done something wrong; otherwise, you wouldn’t be feeling guilty.
You wake up feeling anxious, with a vague sense of dread. You assume that there must be something seriously wrong in your life and search your mind frantically for the source of your ill- feeling.
Often your feelings are simply due to a thought or memory that you may not even be totally aware of having had. Other times they can be symptoms of another disorder such as depression or anxiety problems (see Chapter 9 for information about anxiety disorders and Chapter 12 for more on depression). Some of the feelings you experience on waking are left over from dreams that you may or may not remember. As a rule of thumb, it pays to be somewhat sceptical about the validity of your feelings in the first instance. Your feelings can be misleading.
When you spot emotional reasoning taking over your thoughts, take a step back and try the following:
1 Take notice of your thoughts.Take notice of thoughts such as ‘I’m feeling nervous; something must be wrong’ and ‘I’m so angry, and that really shows how badly you’ve behaved’ and recognise that feelings are not always the best measure of reality, especially if you’re not in the best emotional shape at the moment.
2 Ask yourself how you’d view the situation if you were feeling calmer.Look to see if there is any concrete evidence to support your interpretation of your feelings. For example, is there really any evidence that something bad is going to happen?
3 Give yourself time to allow your feelings to subside.When you’re feeling calmer, review your conclusions and remember that it is quite possible that your feelings are the consequence of your present emotional state (or even just fatigue) rather than reliable indicators of the state of reality.
4 If you can’t find any obvious and immediate source of your unpleasant feelings – overlook them.Get into the shower despite your sense of dread, for example. If a concrete reason to be anxious does exist, it won’t get dissolved in the shower. If your anxiety is all smoke and mirrors, you may well find it washes down the drain.
© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
FIGURE 2-5: Emotional reasoning.
Overgeneralising: Avoiding the Part/Whole Error
Overgeneralising is the error of drawing global conclusions from one or more events. When you find yourself thinking ‘always’, ‘never’, ‘people are …’ or ‘the world’s …’, you may well be overgeneralising. Take a look at Figure 2-6. Here, our stick man sees one sheep in a flock and instantly assumes the whole flock of sheep is black. However, his overgeneralisation is inaccurate because the rest of the flock are white sheep.
© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
FIGURE 2-6: Overgeneralising.
You might recognise overgeneralising in the following examples:
You feel down. When you get into your car to go to work, it doesn’t start. You think to yourself, ‘Things like this are always happening to me. Nothing ever goes right’, which makes you feel even more gloomy.
You become angry easily. Travelling to see a friend, you’re delayed by a fellow passenger who cannot find the money to pay her train fare. You think, ‘This is typical! Other people are just so stupid’, and you become tense and angry.
You tend to feel guilty easily. You yell at your child for not understanding his homework and then decide that you’re a thoroughly rotten parent.
Situations are rarely so stark or extreme that they merit terms like ‘always’ and ‘never’. Rather than overgeneralising, consider the following:
Get a little perspective. How true is the thought that nothing ever goes right for you? How many other people in the world may be having car trouble at this precise moment?
Suspend judgement. When you judge all people as stupid, including the poor creature waiting in line for the train, you make yourself more outraged and are less able to deal effectively with a relatively minor hiccup.
Be specific. Would you be a totally rotten parent for losing patience with your child? Can you legitimately conclude that one incident of poor parenting cancels out all the good things you do for your little one? Perhaps your impatience is simply an area you need to target for improvement.
