This cognitive distortion might be ruining your life
Emotional reasoning is the cognitive distortion that involves concluding that one’s emotional reaction proves something is true, regardless of the empirical evidence.
Examples of this include:
- Feeling overweight and concluding that you are “fat” and must restrict your diet, despite health professionals sharing concerns about your low weight.
- Feeling anxious and concluding that you will fail an assignment, despite passing your last ten assignments with flying colours.
- Feeling paranoid and concluding that you are being hunted by the government, despite having no empirical evidence to support this.
- Feeling unattractive and concluding that no one could ever love you, despite the fact that even elephant seals – which have faces like smashed pumpkins – find love (I joke, but you get the point).
A CBT*- and ACT**-informed protocol to combat emotional reasoning
Here’s a brief protocol to help combat the effects of emotional reasoning in your life:
- Acknowledge and allow yourself to experience what you are feeling. Do not push the emotional response away. It demands to be felt.
- Pause and create some space between the emotion and your actions. Do this by engaging in some deep breathing and/or engaging in a ‘thought unhooking’ exercise (i.e., defusion) like Leaves on a Stream.
- Generate a list of all possible explanations for what you are feeling regardless of how likely you feel these explanations may be.
- Evaluate the evidence for and against these explanations. In doing so, stick to the facts and what we know to be true. You may wish to consult a trusted person when evaluating this evidence.
- Act in accordance with the evidence and your values.
