<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="47" > bad emotions stem from distorted negative thoughts</h1>
The negative thoughts that flow into your head are actually the real cause of your unfavorable emotions.
Every time, if you feel a little depressed, then try to look for it and see if there are corresponding negative thoughts before or during this period. Because in fact it is these thoughts that create your emotions. By learning to reinvent your thoughts, you can change your emotions.
The relationship between what is thought and felt is shown in the figure below. It clarifies the first meaning of understanding emotions: your emotions are generated entirely by the way you look at things. An obvious neurological fact is that before you can experience any event, you have to give it meaning through your emotional fluctuations. Before you can feel it, you have to understand what's going on.
If you understand exactly what happened, your emotions will be normal. If your perception is somehow distorted, then your emotional response will be abnormal. Depression happens to be one such condition. It is always the result of a "static" distortion of the mind.
Man is essentially sufficient; Life has infinite potential. Your sadness is like the radio not being able to tune to the right radio band and emitting harsh music. The problem is not the tube or semiconductor tube, nor is the radio station bad due to the bad weather, you just need to adjust the channel band. When you learn to tune mentally, the music can come clearly again, and your depression will be swept away.
Some readers—perhaps you—may experience the pain of disappointment when they read the above passage. What caused you to suddenly feel depressed while reading this text? It's your thoughts, "For everyone else, just a little tuning is fine, but I'm a broken radio that can't be repaired, and my tubes are broken." I don't care if thousands of other depressed patients get better – I'm sure my problem is certainly hopeless. I listen to this assertion fifty times a week! Almost all depressed patients think they are special and have no hope. This illusion represents a certain state of mind, and that is where your illness lies.
It is not the event itself but your perception that causes a change in your mood. When you are sad, your mind will give a true explanation of the negative event. When you're depressed or anxious, your thoughts are always illogical, distorted, unrealistic, or simply wrong.
The 10 cognitive distortions given in Burns' New Emotion Therapy can help us test our cognition and help us better emerge from bad emotions.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="11" > multiple definitions of cognitive distortion</h1>
Peruse the list of ten cognitive distortions below that form the basis of your depressed mood. This part is important and will be repeated in later practice.
Either/or. You look at things in black and white categories, and if you don't perform perfectly, you think you're a complete failure.
For example, a student who has always scored an A says after getting a B on an exam, "Now I'm all out." This method of judging things is unrealistic, because life is rarely absolutely either/or. For example, no one is absolutely good or absolutely stupid. Likewise, no one is going to be absolutely radiant or absolutely ugly.
Sweeping. You see an isolated negative event as a pattern of failure that will last forever.
For example, if something is not successful, it will feel that it will not succeed in the future. You would arbitrarily assume that once something happens, it happens to you over and over again. Since what is going to happen is inevitably unpleasant, you will feel sad.
Mind filtering. You choose a negative detail and think about it over and over again. As a result, in your eyes, the whole reality becomes dark, like a drop of ink staining an entire glass of water.
When you're depressed, you put on a special pair of colored glasses, and through their filtering, everything becomes negative. You only let the negatives into your consciousness. Since you don't yet understand this "filtering program," you conclude that everything is negative. Terminology refers to this process as "selective absorption." It's a bad habit, and it's going to cause you unnecessary pain.
Negative positive. Detract from the positive. You refuse to acknowledge positive experiences, and you'll find reasons of one kind or another to think they "don't count." This way you can hold on to negative beliefs that contradict your daily experience.
Jump to conclusions. Even if there are no definite facts convincingly supporting your conclusions, you will give a negative explanation of the matter.
a. Cardiac testing. You think that others look down on you, and you are convinced of this, and you don't even bother to check it out.
b. Prophetic error. You expect things to get worse, and you firmly believe that this prophecy is a fact that has already been established.
For example, a keen physician with depression explained to me why he had to give up treatment: "I realized I was going to be depressed all the time. My misfortune will continue, and I am convinced that this or any other treatment is doomed to failure. Negative thoughts about the symptoms made him feel hopeless. His symptoms improved shortly after he began treatment, which shows how unfounded his past predictions were.
Exaggeration and reduction. You exaggerate the importance of things (like something you messed up or someone else's grades) or inappropriately narrow down the strengths, and it's easy to fall into low self-esteem.
Emotional reasoning. You assume that your negativity necessarily reflects the reality of things: "I feel this way, so it must be true." "You use emotions as a basis for facts. Your logic is "I feel inferior, then I must be a useless waste" and "I'm not in the mood to do things, so I might as well lie in bed in a daze", which is misleading because your feelings reflect only your thoughts and beliefs. If they are distorted, your emotions lose their correctness.
Should be stated. You try to excite yourself with "should" or "should not" as if you should be flogged or punished before expecting you to do something. "Must" and "should have" were also to blame. The result of this emotion is a sense of guilt. Similarly, when you ask someone to ask for what should be stated, you experience anger, discouragement, and resentment. Think of yourself as a victim.
Random labeling. Labeling is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your mistakes, you label yourself negatively: "I'm a loser." "When someone else's behavior is having sex with you in an inappropriate way, you also label him with a label: "He's a damn guy." "Mislabeling refers to describing something in highly subjective or highly emotional language.
If you score lower than expected on your test, you might think "I'm a useless person" instead of "I made a mistake." Your ego cannot be equated with anything you do. When you label others indiscriminately, you inevitably bring hostility. Mislabeling can make you use inaccurate words and be too emotional in describing things. This is complete nonsense. But when you label yourself based on some aspect of your inadequacies, this nonsense becomes a pain.
remorse. You will see yourself as the cause of many negative external events, and in fact you should not be primarily responsible for these things.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="23" > feels not true</h1>
Once you develop depression through a series of "autonomous" cognitive distortions, your feelings and behaviors reinforce each other in a self-perpetuating circle. Because you believe everything the depressed brain tells you, you'll find that you feel negative about almost anything. This reflection is done in a thousandth of a second, so fast that you can't even realize it. This negative feeling feels very real, and it in turn casts an aura over the credibility of the distorted thoughts that created it. It's a cycle that goes on and on, and eventually you're hooked up. The emotional prison of the mind is an illusion, a deception that you have inadvertently created, but it seems to be true because you feel that it is real.
Your thoughts create your emotions, so your emotions cannot prove that your thoughts are correct.