Hey there. This is Aime Lynn with Flipswitch’s Erasing Negative Thoughts. On each edition of Erasing Negative Thoughts, we identify one way of stinkin thinkin and show how it’s more often than not, either completely untrue or extremely exaggerated. All too often hand in hand with depression, don’t fall prey to these outright false ways of thinking.
On this edition of Erasing Negative Thoughts, we’ll cover the distorted way of thinking pattern known as “Emotional Reasoning”.
“I’m so overwhelmed with work. I know I’m doing a bad job.”
“I’ll feel awful. I am awful.”
“I don’t feel like going out and being around people, so I shouldn’t go out and be around people.”
These are just a smattering of examples of emotional reasoning.
Emotional reasoning occurs when you simply think that reality matches the way you feel instead of anything to do with evidence or physics or anything else in the world. Nope. You feel it, therefore it’s true.
Except, that’s not how the world really works does it?
I mean, you don’t say, “How much gas do I have in my tank? The gauge says empty, but I feel it’s full, so it must be full.”
You don’t say, “I don’t feel hot, therefore I know I won’t get sunburned on a sunny day.”
No, of course, not. That’s just silly.
Yet, these are exactly the types of warped thoughts people all too often employ in the depths of a dark depression. They become certain that they are so worthless simply because they feel they are, even going so far as to argue as good as any lawyer against those people that try to dispute this “truth”. They wall themselves off from opportunities to feel better because they’ve let their feelings overcome reality.
But the good news is it doesn’t have to be that way. Stop and think: I feel this way. So what? What’s the actual evidence for my belief. Maybe more importantly, what’s the evidence against my negative belief.
Live a life based on reality, not just what you feel.
This has been Aime Lynn with Erasing Negative Thoughts here on Flipswitch.
