Connecting Behavior, Mood, and Thinking
Decrease stress by getting more accurate in your thinking
The heart of cognitive behavioral therapy is identifying the interplay between behavior, mood, and thoughts. When we begin to make these connections we develop our resilience and supercharge our ability to better manage stress.
In an earlier post I discussed the benefits of behavioral tracking. This is one of the easiest and quickest ways to assess where you are at in terms of mood.
Take out the tracking you created. As you look over the record are there any patterns? Are there situations in which your stress levels reliably tend to go up?
Now add a column to your tracking device and start to look at what thoughts come up when stress levels start to rise. What is the content of these thoughts?
Next look at any recurrent subject matter or tone that you notice. Are there a lot of thoughts that tend to be self deprecating? Do your thoughts tend to look at others as the source of your stress?
Now is the time to investigate those thoughts for accuracy. We tend to believe what we think but not all thoughts are accurate. Many times we act on thoughts that we believe about ourselves, but that just aren’t true. Attempting to solve a problem based on inaccurate information can lead to a bigger problem and/or an ineffective solution.
Sometimes we act on thoughts that are distorted by our beliefs about ourselves and the world around us. It is here we tend to vastly underestimate both ourselves and the world.
A few types of thought distortions.
Minimization: downplaying positive events
Overgeneralization: Making a sweeping conclusion based on a single piece of evidence.
Personalization: Attributing negative thoughts or situations solely to oneself.
Magnification: Exaggerating the significance of a single undesirable event.
Selective abstraction: drawing conclusions based on just one of many elements of a situation.
Arbitrary inference: drawing conclusions from insufficient or no evidence.
Learning to identify and challenge our inaccurate thoughts is key to working with more accurate thinking about ourselves. We aren’t trying to overturn every thought or make negative thoughts all glowing and positive. Our task is simply to make our thoughts as accurate as possible.
Challenging our thoughts
One way to to this is to ask questions concerning our more negative thought patterns. Asking the following questions can be helpful.
If my best friend or family member had this thought what would I tell them?
Do I think about this differently when I am not stressed?
Would this thought stand up in a court of law?
Is there any evidence that shows this thought is not true?
How is this line of thinking helping me?
Has there ever been a time when this thought was not true?
Developing more accurate thinking
Once we identify the distorted thinking and challenge/reframe it we can begin to develop more accurate thinking about ourselves and the world around us.
Thoughts like—“Everyone is against me”—can be challenged and changed into—“X is angry with me right now, but that doesn’t mean that he/she is against me.” Why do I jump to this? Is is based on some past harm that is no longer accurate?
When we accurately identify and challenge thoughts we go from a brick wall statement “Everyone is against me.” To having a little wiggle room. Wiggle room helps decrease our overall stress. While having a friend be angry with us isn’t pleasant we can see this as temporal and something that can change. Once that occurs you may feel your mood shift to being less sharp as well. We all get angry sometimes and in this way we can note that anger usually isn’t long lasting and can change over time. We can better give our friend some grace and know “this too shall pass.”
Give it a try this week and see what you notice about your thinking.