Our thoughts and our moods (Part 1)

“We are what we think.”

The Dhammapada (India, c. 480 BC)

OUR MOODS

Our everyday commonsense view of the world probably goes something like this: “I’m happy because I just got a raise”, or “I’m angry because I’ve had an argument with my husband”, or “I’m anxious because I have a big exam tomorrow.” In other words, how I’m feeling, what kind of a mood I’m in is in some way caused by what is going on in my world at the moment.

Well there does seem to be an obvious connection between the two - what is going on, and how I happen to be feeling. No question about that, but is this the whole story? Let me suggest an additional consideration: isn’t there an intervening layer between what is happening and how we are feeling, i.e. what I am thinking about what is happening, and how I am interpreting what is going on. Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about.

Imagine two people sitting on a plane when some unexpected turbulence occurs and the pilot turns the seatbelt sign on. One person starts to think, “Oh my God, this turbulence is scary, I wonder if this plane is strong enough to stand up to it, what happens if it isn’t, I’ve heard about structural failures and horrible plane crashes, could this be happening now? I can’t stand it.”

How do you think this person is most likely feeling after thinking these thoughts? Anxious, scared, and would probably like to get off the plane right now, but that’s not possible, and that makes it even worse.

Let’s turn to our other passenger. As soon as the turbulence begins, she thinks to herself, “Turbulence happens all the time on these flights, in fact the planes are designed for it, and the pilots are trained and experienced at dealing with it. Turbulence very rarely results in an accident, so I think I’m just going to go back to the book I am reading.”

How do you think this person feels? A bit calmer, probably, and unlikely to be worrying so much about the flight.

You may have guessed at the point I’m trying to make here, that it not the turbulence that made the first person anxious, or the second person calmer, it’s what he or she was thinking about the turbulence, how he or she was interpreting it. If it was just the event in the world - the turbulence - that was causing the first person to feel anxious, why didn’t the second person feel the same way? Obviously something more is at work, and that something is our thoughts.

AUTOMATIC THOUGHTS

This may not seem obvious at first or applicable to us, and there is a reason for this. What we are thinking often happens very quickly without us being fully aware of it, and these are called “automatic thoughts.” These thoughts may take a little bit of effort to become aware of, as they often operate just below our normal level of consciousness. These thoughts can occur very quickly, so quickly that we may have difficulty sometimes in believing that they exist, let alone that they are affecting how we are feeling.

But you can find out for yourself right now. Think back to a time when you noticed your mood had changed, it can be this morning, it can be a few weeks ago. Maybe you had become more anxious or angry or uncomfortable. Then cast your mind back to when the mood change began, and ask yourself, “What was going through my mind at that point?” 

Usually we can get some idea of what we were actually thinking. If this is still elusive, we can ask “what might I have been thinking?” and this can also help us get at what was passing through our minds. Another important point here too: it is not just thoughts, but images too that are going through our minds that can affect how we’re feeling, and which we can also become aware of.

Here’s another example: I had a client who came in to see me feeling a bit down and discouraged. “When did this begin?” I asked. “Oh, last night”, he said. His wife, who lived in another country, had been supposed to call him at 8 PM the previous evening and she hadn’t. He hadn’t worried much about it until 10 or 15 minutes later, and then he noticed that he had begun to feel a bit angry, then a bit panicky, and then later in the evening, a bit depressed. He had still not heard from his wife as of the following morning, when I was seeing him, and he felt quite down.

Perhaps it seems normal to believe that he would feel this way, as his wife hadn’t called, that these events clearly “caused” his feelings, but let’s look a bit closer to what actually happened. I asked him “What started going through your mind when she didn’t ring?”

“Well”, he said, “At first, I thought she was just being inconsiderate, and I was a bit pissed off, and then I stared to wonder if there was a reason why she hadn’t called. Maybe she had forgotten, and maybe her forgetting was a sign that she wasn’t that interested in talking to me any more, and I began to feel a bit nervous. She lives next to some members of her family, so I figured there hadn’t been an accident or someone would have called me, so if that wasn’t it maybe it was because she was losing touch with me, caring less. After all, I have been working abroad and supporting our family for a few years now. Actually, she has been alone a good portion of this time, so who knows, maybe she had found someone else. And then I noticed I was feeling a bit depressed.”

All from one missed telephone call! But haven’t we all done something like this at one time or other? Maybe we’re engaging in some version of this more often than we know….

As it happens, there was a problem with the phone system and she called later in the day, but I think this illustrates very well that it is what we think about an event, or missed event, that often determines how we feel, rather than the event itself.

COGNITIVE DISTORTIONS

Which brings me to my next important point - and this is easy to see in this example, though it may be more subtle in other contexts – that sometimes what we are thinking can be distorted or exaggerated in some way. So it’s not just the fact that we tend to think about things, which after all is unavoidable, but how we are thinking about them that may produce the negative feelings.

While studying people who were experiencing depression and anxiety, Cognitive Psychologists noticed that their thinking tended to reflect certain patterns that were not quite so pronounced in persons who were not feeling this way. There are a number of these “Cognitive Distortions” (Burns, 1987) and “Irrational Beliefs” (Ellis, 1996), and I have listed those that my clients and I have found most helpful in our work together.

1. All or Nothing thinking: This is possibly the Granddaddy of all distortions, along with #2. Here we tend to see things in black or white categories. For example, if I’m a student and get a low grade on a particular essay, I may believe that this means I’ll never be a good student.

2. Catastrophizing/Awfulizing: This is where we consider absolutely the worst outcomes imaginable, and become convinced of not just their possibility but also their probability.

3. Mind Reading: This is where I just know that people are thinking about me, and what they are thinking, and typically it’s pretty negative. But how can I know for sure, might I be mistaken?

4. Fortune Telling: Most of us find it hard to say what will happen tomorrow, let alone the rest of our lives, yet we consistently believe we know how things will turn out, how this meeting will turn out, or that relationship, or how I’ll do at that public speaking engagement.

5. Personalization:  When I believe something to be my fault and take blame/responsibility when it’s really not, such as for someone else’s feelings. Burns calls this the Grandfather of guilt.

6. Musts and Shoulds:  In his inimitable way, Ellis refers to the tendency to feel we must and have to do this or that as “musterbation.” This is not just that I must be able to do everything perfectly, for example, but that the world and others should be a certain way as well. “This shouldn’t be happening, it’s unfair”, or “People should or must treat me better”.

7. Disqualifying the Positive:  We focus on what is wrong, and minimize or even disqualify completely our legitimate achievements and good qualities.

8. Low Frustration Tolerance:  This is often missed. It is the thought and belief that ‘I can’t stand it, I shouldn’t have to feel this way’, when in fact, though it may be unpleasant, we are quite capable of ‘standing it’.

9. Self and Other Rating:  This is the tendency to make global judgments of ourselves and others. It is fine to judge this or that particular behavior, but it doesn’t make sense to rate the totality of others and ourselves at the same time, though this is often what causes the most pain, and what we tend to do automatically. “I failed my exam; therefore I’m a total failure and generally bad person.”

Do you recognize any of these ways of thinking from your own experience?

To return to our example of the fellow whose wife didn’t call on time, we can apply these categories and see what we come up with. There seems to be some catastrophizing, when he tells himself that if she hasn’t called, he automatically jumps to the conclusion that she has found someone else. Similarly, there might be some mind reading when he interprets the missed call as perhaps meaning she doesn’t care anymore.

This demonstrates a very important point about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), that it is not so much that we want to replace these negative thoughts with positive thoughts so much as we are replacing incorrect (unrealistic) thoughts with more correct (realistic) thoughts. If we, for example, replace unrealistic negative thoughts with similarly unrealistic and untrue positive ones (“I’m the best person in the world”, instead of “I’m the worst person in the world”), then we aren’t really coming to grips with the issue, are we?

The point is that we want to replace distorted thoughts with more accurate ones, and when our negative thoughts have been unrealistically distorted, this invariably gives us a degree of relief as we realize that things are simply not as awful as we had imagined. We may not solve the ‘problem’ we think we have (though sometimes that happens), but it almost always ‘takes the edge off’ because we are not making an uncomfortable situation into a catastrophic, awful one through our interpretation of the situation. This is the first step in coping better, seeing the situation for what it is, and not what we’re worried it might be.

EVIDENCE

How can we tell if what we’re thinking is a distortion? We are interested in a scientific approach to our experience, and this means looking at the evidence. In fact, in this whole process we can think of ourselves as scientists, examining each of our thoughts and beliefs to determine if it is true or not. And how do scientists go about their business - through looking for and establishing evidence for a hypothesis. Actually, we can look at each thought and belief we become aware of and treat it as if it was a mini-hypothesis, and ask what is the evidence, if any, that it might be true (or not), and whether there might be a better alternative explanation.

As it happens, I did precisely this with this client. I asked him whether the fact that his wife didn’t call, was sufficient evidence in itself that she no longer cared about him? For example, was she in the habit recently of missing phone calls or other commitments she had made with you? “No”, he said, “This was the first time in the couple of years that I have been away from home”. Were there any other signs of indifference from her of late, or at all? “No,” he said, “I haven’t seen anything like this, or heard anything from family or friends at home that she might be involved with someone else”. “So”, I said, “if there was no real evidence for some of his fears, what might there actually be evidence for?” Well, we didn’t know for sure, of course, but now that we were looking at this way, he said, “I guess maybe she was delayed by one of the kids or maybe one of the kids was ill, or they got stuck in traffic”. “Right”, I said, “and thinking about it in this way, how does it make you feel?” “Relief”, he said. “I’m still a little worried but I guess it seems there’s more likely a logical explanation, and I don’t need to believe everything I think. I guess I was a little lonely and was worrying too much, its all probably OK”.

DISPUTING

So what we did together, was to become aware of what he was saying to himself, see how this was affecting how he was feeling, and then dispute some of the automatic thoughts, and discover that some or all of them may have been exaggerated or distorted, and that there are likely alternative ways to explain what happened. And when these were corrected, the feelings automatically changed from worry and fear, to relief and a greater sense of confidence that while he still didn’t know why his wife hadn’t called, there was no real reason to think the worst. There may still be a little bit of anxiety about not getting the call, but it is much less than if he believed the various catastrophic interpretations of what might have happened.

To repeat my point, above: when we dispute our distorted thinking, we are not doing so simply by replacing negative thoughts with positive ones. We are replacing negative thoughts with more realistic ones, ones that are more likely to be true, even if we aren’t in possession of all the facts. This is what makes CBT so powerful, it is not mere positive thinking, though this too may have its place, it is seeing that we have been in some way mistaken in our beliefs and that we do not need to be quite so pessimistic based on a more objective analysis of the facts.