Now, there was no difference in the information given to these individuals, but there was a significant difference in how they felt afterward. When it was time to go home, he decided to spend a little more time working on a presentation he would be giving next month. Afterward, she found herself seething with rage, unable to concentrate, and eventually leaving early to have a drink at home.ĭante on the other hand, received the same exact feedback, and afterward found himself to be in a good mood the rest of the day. Joan received a performance review in which 90% of the feedback was positive, and 10% was somewhat negative. Take the following examples using the same situation of the performance review: Learning to examine these thoughts allows us to better understand and deal with our emotions, modulating them before they get too intense or overwhelming. However, in most instances it is the automatic thoughts that play the largest role in determining how we feel, not the situation itself. Usually, we are more aware of the emotions themselves than the thoughts that trigger them. The above example highlights a very common dynamic: Automatic thoughts have the potential to trigger intense negative emotions. Despite the majority of the feedback being positive, negative filtering might cause us to perceive the review as wholly negative, triggering emotions of disappointment, sadness, or anxiety. We call this phenomenon negative filtering, which means filtering out all but the negative information. It’s not uncommon for people who have a mostly good performance review to filter out most of the praise and instead fixate on the one or two areas where there’s room for improvement. Take for example a pretty common experience, the job performance review. Other times, we assign meaning to something that isn’t totally grounded in the actual facts of the situation. This process works well most of the time, but sometimes we focus on less important bits of information, filtering out the more relevant parts. It does this by focusing on certain aspects of a situation, then assigning some kind of meaning to those aspects, resulting in our thoughts and opinions about things. The brain is pretty good at filtering what it deems to be unimportant information and focusing on what seems to be most salient. Most thoughts enter and leave our minds out of our awareness. Thankfully, that’s not how our brain works. If we were to attend to each one of these, we would be overwhelmed by the flood of information. Our minds are thought processing machines, creating and sifting through as many as 60,000 ideas in a given day. Often, we are completely unaware we are even having thoughts, but with a little instruction and practice, you can learn to easily identify them, and as a result, get a better handle on your mood and behavior. In this book, we’ll be referring to a specific kind of thoughts that we call “automatic thoughts.” Automatic thoughts are the thoughts that automatically arise in our minds all throughout the day. Thoughts influence much of our experience of the world, including our emotional experience. The key to understanding feelings is identifying the thoughts associated with them. Sometimes we feel an emotion seemingly out of the blue, too strongly for what’s going on, or in a way that doesn’t seem to fit the situation at all. Some feelings may seem predictable in certain situations, but others may be puzzling. If you’re working through this book in order, you’ve been spending some time identifying and thinking about feelings. Part 5: Identifying Automatic Thoughts in CBT What Are Automatic Thoughts?

Types of automatic thoughts