Figure 2-8:
Demands.
The inflexibility of the demands you place on yourself, the world around you, and other people often means you don’t adapt to reality as well as you could. Consider these possible examples:
You believe that you Must Have the approval of your friends and colleagues. This leads you to feel anxious in many social situations and drives you to try and win everyone’s approval.
You think that because you try very hard to be kind and considerate to others, they really Ought To be just as kind and considerate in return. Because your demand is not realistic – sadly, other people are governed
By their own priorities – you often feel hurt about your friends not acting the way you do yourself.
You believe that you Absolutely should Never let people down. Therefore, you rarely put your own welfare first. At work, you do more than your fair share because you don’t assert yourself, and so you often end up feeling stressed and depressed.
Holding Flexible preferences About yourself, other people, and the world in general is the healthy alternative to inflexible rules and demands. Rather than making demands on yourself, the world, and others, try the following techniques:
Pay attention to language. Replace words like ‘must’, ‘need’, and ‘should’ with ‘prefer’, ‘wish’, and ‘want’.
Limit approval seeking. Can you manage to have a satisfying life even if you don’t get the approval of everyone you seek it from? Specifically, you’ll feel more confident in social situations if you hold a Preference For approval rather than viewing approval as a dire need.
Understand that the world doesn’t play to your rules. In fact, other people tend to have their own rulebooks. So, no matter how much you value considerate behaviour, your friends may not give it the same value. If you can give others the right to not live up to your standards, you’ll feel less hurt when they fail to do so.
Retain your standards, ideals, and preferences, and ditch your rigid demands about how you, others, and the world ‘have to’ be. So keep acting consistently with how you Would like Things to be rather than becoming depressed or irate about things not being the way you believe they Must Be.
When you hold rigid demands about the way things ‘have got to be’, you have no margin for deviation or error. You leave yourself vulnerable to experiencing exaggerated emotional disturbance when things in life just don’t go your way.
Mental Filtering: Keeping an Open Mind
Mental filtering Is a bias in the way you process information, in which you acknowledge only information that fits with a belief you hold. The process is much like a filter on a camera lens that allows in only certain kinds of light. Information that doesn’t fit tends to be ignored. If you think any of the following, you’re making the ‘mental filtering’ thinking error:
You believe you’re a failure, so you tend to focus on your mistakes at work and overlook successes and achievements. At the end of the week, you often feel disappointed about your lack of achievement – but this is probably largely the result of you not paying attention to your successes.
You believe you’re unlikeable, and Really Notice each time your friend is late to call back or seems too busy to see you. You tend to disregard the ways in which people act warmly towards you, which sustains your view that you’re unlikeable.
To combat mental filtering, look more closely at situations you feel down about. Deliberately collecting evidence that contradicts your negative thoughts can help you to correct your information-processing bias. Try the following:
Examine your filters closely. For example, are you sifting your achievements through an ‘I’m a failure’ filter? If so, then only failure-related information gets through. If you look for a friend’s achievements over the same week without a filter, you’d be likely to find far more success.
Gather evidence. Imagine you’re collecting evidence for a court case to prove that your negative thought isn’t true. What evidence do you cite? Would, for example, an assertion that you’re unlikeable stand up in court against the proof of your friends behaving warmly towards you?
If you only ever take in information that fits with the way you think, you can very easily end up thinking the same way. The fact that you don’t see the positive stuff about yourself, or your experiences, doesn’t mean it isn’t there (just bear in mind Figure 2-9!).
Disqualifying the Positive: Keeping the Baby When Throwing Out the Bathwater
Disqualifying the positive (see Figure 2-10) is related to the biased way that people can process information. Disqualifying the positive is a mental action that transforms a positive event into a neutral or negative event in your mind.
Figure 2-10:
Disqualifying the positive.
The following are examples of disqualifying the positive:
You believe that you’re worthless and unlovable. You respond to a work promotion by thinking, ‘This doesn’t count, because anyone could get this sort of thing.’ The result: Instead of feeling pleased, you feel quite disappointed.
You think you’re pathetic and feel low. A friend tells you you’re a very good friend, but you disqualify this in your mind by thinking, ‘She’s only saying that because she feels sorry for me. I really am pathetic’
Hone your skills for accepting compliments and acknowledging your good points. You can try the following strategies to improve your skills:
I Become aware of your responses to positive ‘data’. Practice acknowledging and accepting positive feedback and acknowledging good points about yourself, others, and the world. For example, you could override your workplace disappointment by recognising that You’re The one who
Got the promotion. You can even consider that the promotion may well have been a result of your hard work.
Practice accepting a compliment graciously with a simple thank you.
Rejecting a sincerely delivered compliment is rather like turning down a gift. Steer your thinking towards taking in positive experiences. When others point out attributes you have, start deliberately making a note of those good points.
If you frequently disqualify or distort your positive attributes or experiences, you can easily sustain a negative belief about yourself, even in the face of overwhelming positive evidence.
Lout Frustration Tolerance: Realising \lou Can Bear the ‘Unbearable’
Low frustration tolerance Refers to the error of assuming that when something’s difficult to tolerate, it’s ‘intolerable’. This thinking error means magnifying discomfort and not tolerating temporary discomfort when it’s in your interest to do so for longer-term benefit, as we show in Figure 2-11.
Figure 2-11:
Low frustration tolerance.
The following are examples of low frustration tolerance:
You often procrastinate on college assignments, thinking, ‘It’s just too much hassle. I’ll do it later when I feel more in the mood.’ You tend to wait until the assignment’s nearly due and it becomes too uncomfortable to put off any longer. Unfortunately, waiting until the last moment means that you can rarely put as much time and effort into your course-work as you need to in order to reach your potential.
You want to overcome your anxiety of travelling away from home by facing your fear directly. And yet, each time you try to travel farther on the train, you become anxious, and think ‘This is so horrible, I can’t stand it’, and quickly return home, which reinforces your fear rather than helping you experience travel as less threatening.
The best way to overcome low frustration tolerance is to foster an alternative attitude of High frustration tolerance. You can achieve this way of thinking by trying the following:
Pushing yourself to do things that are uncomfortable or unpleasant.
For example, you can train yourself to work on assignments even if you aren’t in the mood, because the end result of finishing work in good time, and to a good standard, outweighs the hassle of doing something you find tedious.
Giving yourself messages that emphasise your ability to withstand pain. To combat a fear of travel, you can remind yourself that feeling anxious is really unpleasant, but you Can Stand it. Ask yourself whether, in the past, you’ve ever withstood the feelings you’re saying you presently ‘can’t stand’.
Telling yourself you can’t stand something has two effects. First, it leads you to focus more on the discomfort you’re experiencing. Second, it leads you to underestimate your ability to cope with discomfort. Many things can be difficult to tolerate, but rating them as ‘intolerable’ often makes situations seem more daunting than they really are.
Personalising: Removing \lourself from the Centre of the Universe
Personalising involves interpreting events as being related to you personally and overlooking other factors. This can lead to emotional difficulties, such as feeling hurt easily or feeling unnecessarily guilty (see Figure 2-12).
Here are some examples of personalising:
You may tend to feel guilty if you know a friend is upset and you can’t make him feel better. You think, ‘If I was really a good friend, I’d be able to cheer him up. I’m obviously letting him down.’
You feel hurt when a friend you meet in a shop leaves quickly after saying only a hurried ‘hello’. You think, ‘He was obviously trying to avoid talking to me. I must have offended him somehow.’
You can tackle personalising by considering alternative explanations that don’t revolve around you. Think about the following examples:
Imagine what else may have contributed to the outcome you’re assuming personal responsibility for. Your friend may have lost his job or be suffering from depression. Despite your best efforts to cheer him up, these factors are outside your control.
Consider why people may be responding to you in a certain way.
Don’t jump to the conclusion that someone’s response relates directly to you. For example, your friend may be having a difficult day or be in a big hurry – he may even feel sorry for not stopping to talk to you.
Because you really aren’t the centre of the universe, look for explanations of events that have little or nothing to do with you.
Getting intimate with your thinking
Figuring out which thinking errors you tend to make the most can be a useful way of making your CBT self-help more efficient and effective. The simplest way of doing this is to jot down yourthoughtswheneveryoufeel upsetand note whatwas happening atthetime. Rememberthe maxim: When you feel bad, put your thoughts on the pad! See Chapter 3 for more on managing unhelpful thoughts by writing them down.
You can then review your thoughts against the list of thinking errors in this chapter and write down next to each unhelpful thought which
Thinking erroryou may be making. With practice you can get better at spotting your thinking errors – and in all probability, you may notice that you’re more prone to making some errors than others. You can then choose which alternative thinking styles to develop.
You may also become aware of patterns or themes in the kinds of situations or events that trigger your negative thoughts. These can also help you to focus on the areas in which your thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes need most work.
Chapter 3