Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy

by Burns, David D.

3. Since I’m not rich, successful, or famous, I can’t really enjoy things to the hilt.

  4. I can’t enjoy things unless I’m the center of attention.

  5. Things won’t be particularly satisfying unless I can do them perfectly (or successfully).

  6. I wouldn’t feel very fulfilled if I did just a part of my work. I’ve got to get it all done today.

  All of these attitudes will produce a round of self-fulfilling prophecies if you don’t put them to the test. If, however, you check them out using the Pleasure-Predicting Sheet, you may be amazed to learn that life can offer you enormous fulfillment. Help yourself!

  A question that commonly comes up about the Pleasure-Predicting Sheet is: “Suppose I do schedule a number of activities, and I find out they are just as unpleasant as I had anticipated?” This might happen. If so, try noting your negative thoughts and write them down, answering them with the Daily Record of Dysfunctional Thoughts. For example, suppose you go to a restaurant on your own and feel tense. You might be thinking, “These people probably think I’m a loser because I’m here all alone.”

  How would you answer this? You might remind yourself that other people’s thoughts do not affect your mood one iota. I have demonstrated this to patients by telling them I will think two thoughts about them for fifteen seconds each. One thought will be extremely positive, and the other will be intensely negative and insulting. They are to tell me how each of my thoughts affects them. I close my eyes and think, “Jack here is a fine person and I like him.” Then I think, “Jack is the worst person in Pennsylvania.” Since Jack doesn’t know which thought is which, they have no effect on him!

  Does that brief experiment strike you as trivial? It’s not—because only your thoughts can ever affect you. For example, if you are in a restaurant feeling miserable because you are alone, you really have no idea what people are thinking. It’s your thoughts and only yours that are making you feel terrible; you’re the only person in the world who can effectively persecute yourself. Why do you label yourself a “loser” because you’re in a restaurant alone? Would you be so cruel to someone else? Stop insulting yourself like that! Talk back to that automatic thought with a rational response: “Going to a restaurant alone doesn’t make me a loser. I have just as much right to be here as anyone else. If someone doesn’t like it, so what? As long as I respect myself, I don’t need to be concerned with others’ opinions.”

  How to Get off Your “But”—the But Rebuttal. Your “but” may represent the greatest obstacle to effective action. The moment you think of doing something productive, you give yourself excuses in the form of buts. For example, “I could go out and jog today, BUT …”

  1. I’m really too tired to;

  2. I’m just too lazy;

  3. I’m not particularly in the mood, etc.

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  Figure 5–6. The But-Rebuttal Method. The zigzag arrows trace your thinking pattern as you debate the issue in your mind.

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  Here’s another example. “I could cut down on my smoking, BUT …”

  1. I don’t have that kind of self-discipline;

  2. I don’t really feel like going cold turkey, and cutting down gradually would be slow torture;

  3. I’ve been too nervous lately.

  If you really want to motivate yourself, you’ll have to learn how to get off your but. One way to do this is with the “But-Rebuttal Method” shown in Figure 5–6. Suppose it’s Saturday and you’ve scheduled mowing the lawn. You’ve procrastinated for three weeks, and it looks like a jungle. You tell yourself, “I really should, BUT I’m just not in the mood.” Record this in the But column. Now fight back by writing a But Rubuttal: “I’ll feel more like it once I get started. When I’m done, I’ll feel terrific.” Your next impulse will probably be to dream up a new objection: “BUT it’s so long it will take forever.” Now fight back with a new rebuttal, as shown in Figure 5–6, and continue this process until you’ve run out of excuses.

  Learn to Endorse Yourself. Do you frequently convince yourself that what you do doesn’t count? If you have this bad habit, you will naturally feel that you never do anything worthwhile. It won’t make any difference if you are a Nobel laureate or a gardener—life will seem empty because your sour attitude will take the joy out of all your endeavors and defeat you before you even begin. No wonder you feel unmotivated!

  To reverse this destructive tendency, a good first step would be to pinpoint the self-downing thoughts that cause you to feel this way in the first place. Talk back to these thoughts and replace them with ones that are more objective and self-endorsing. Some examples of this are shown in Figure 5–7. Once you get the knack of it, practice consciously endorsing yourself all day long for the things you do even if they seem trivial. You may not feel a pleasant emotional lift in the beginning, but keep practicing even if it seems mechanical. After a few days you will begin to experience some mood lift, and you will feel more pride about what you’re doing.

  You may object, “Why should I have to pat myself on the back for everything I do? My family, friends, and business associates should be more appreciative of me.” There are several problems here. In the first place, even if people are overlooking your efforts, you are guilty of the same crime if you also neglect yourself, and pouting won’t improve the situation.

  Even when someone does stroke you, you can’t absorb the praise unless you decide to believe and therefore validate what is being said. How many genuine compliments fall on your deaf ears because you mentally discredit them? When you do this, other people feel frustrated because you don’t respond positively to what they are saying. Naturally, they give up trying to combat your self-downing habit. Ultimately, only what you think about what you do will affect your mood.

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  Figure 5–7.

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  It can be helpful simply to make a written or mental list of the things you do each day. Then give yourself a mental credit for each of them, however small. This will help you focus on what you have done instead of what you haven’t gotten around to doing. It may sound simplistic, but it works!

  TIC-TOC Technique. If you are procrastinating about getting down to a specific task, take note of the way you are thinking about it. These TICs, or Task-Interfering Cognitions, will lose much of their power over you if you simply write them down and substitute more adaptive TOCs, or Task-Oriented Cognitions, using the double-column technique. A number of examples are shown in Figure 5–8. When you record your TIC-TOCs, be sure to pinpoint the distortion in the TIC that defeats you. You may find, for example, that your worst enemy is all-or-nothing thinking or disqualifying the positive, or you may be in the bad habit of making arbitrary negative predictions. Once you become aware of the type of distortion that most commonly thwarts you, you will be able to correct it. Your procrastination and time-wasting will give way to action and creativity.

  You can also apply this principle to mental images and daydreams as well as to thoughts. When you avoid a task, you probably automatically fantasize about it in a negative, defeatist fashion. This creates unnecessary tension and apprehension, which impairs your performance and increases the likelihood that your dreaded fear will actually come true.

  For example, if you have to give a speech to a group of associates, you may fret and worry for weeks ahead of time because in your mind’s eye you see yourself forgetting what you have to say or reacting defensively to a pushy question from the audience. By the time you give the speech, you have effectively programmed yourself to behave just this way, and you’re such a nervous wreck it turns out just as badly as you had imagined!

  If you dare to give it a try, here’s a solution: For ten minutes every night before you go to sleep, practice fantasizing that you deliver the speech in a positive way. Imagine that you appear confident, that you present your material in an energetic manner, and that you handle all questions from the audience warmly and capably. You may be surprised that this simple exercise can go a
long way to improving how you feel about what you do. Obviously there is no guarantee things will always come out exactly as you imagine, but there’s no doubt that your expectations and mood will profoundly influence what actually does happen.

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  Figure 5–8. The TIC-TOC Technique. In the left-hand column, record the thoughts that inhibit your motivation for a specific task. In the right-hand column, pinpoint the distortions and substitute more objective, productive attitudes.

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  Little Steps for Little Feet. A simple and obvious self-activation method involves learning to break any proposed task down into its tiny component parts. This will combat your tendency to overwhelm yourself by dwelling on all the things you have to do.

  Suppose your job involves attending lots of meetings, but you find it difficult to concentrate due to anxiety, depression, or daydreaming. You can’t concentrate effectively because you think, “I don’t understand this as I should. Gosh, this is boring. I’d really prefer to be making love or fishing right now.”

  Here’s how you can beat the boredom, defeat the distraction, and increase your ability to concentrate: Break the task down into its smallest component parts! For example, decide to listen for only three minutes, and then take a one-minute break to daydream intensively. At the end of this mental vacation, listen for another three minutes, and do not entertain any distracting thoughts for this brief period. Then give yourself another one-minute break to daydream.

  This technique will enable you to maintain a more effective level of overall concentration. Giving yourself permission to dwell on distracting thoughts for short periods will diminish their power over you. After a while, they will seem ludicrous.

  An extremely useful way to divide a task into manageable units is through time limitation. Decide how much time you will devote to a particular task, and then stop at the end of the allotted time and go on to something more enjoyable, whether or not you’re finished. As simple as this sounds, it can work wonders. For example, the wife of a political VIP spent years harboring resentment toward her husband for his successful, glamorous life. She felt her life consisted of an oppressive load of child-rearing and housecleaning. Because she was compulsive she never felt she had enough time to complete her dreary chores. Life was a treadmill. She was straddled by depression, and had been unsuccessfully treated by a long string of famous therapists for over a decade as she looked in vain for the elusive key to personal happiness.

  After consulting twice with one of my colleagues (Dr. Aaron T. Beck), she experienced a rapid mood swing out of her depression (his therapeutic wizardry never ceases to astonish me). How did he perform this seeming miracle? Easy. He suggested to her that her depression was due in part to the fact that she wasn’t pursuing goals that were meaningful to her because she didn’t believe in herself. Instead of acknowledging and confronting her fear of taking risks, she blamed her lack of direction on her husband and complained about all the undone housework.

  The first step was to decide how much time she felt she wanted to spend on the housework each day; she was to spend no more than this amount even if the house wasn’t perfect, and she was to budget the rest of the day to pursue activities that interested her. She decided that one hour of housework would be fair, and enrolled in a graduate program so she could develop her own career. This gave her a feeling of liberation. Like magic, the depression vanished along with the anger she harbored toward her husband.

  I don’t want to give you the idea that depression is usually so easy to eliminate. Even in the above case, this patient will probably have to fight off a number of depressive recurrences. She may at times fall back temporarily into the same trap of trying to do too much, blaming others, and feeling overwhelmed. Then she will have to apply the same solution again. The important thing is—she has found a method that works for her.

  The same approach might work for you. Do you tend to bite off bigger pieces than you can comfortably chew? Dare to put modest time limits on what you do! Have the courage to walk away from an unfinished task! You may be amazed that you will experience a substantial increase in your productivity and mood, and your procrastination may become a thing of the past.

  Motivation Without Coercion. A possible source of your procrastination is an inappropriate system for self-motivation. You may inadvertently undermine what you attempt by flagellating yourself with so many “oughts,” “shoulds,” and “musts” that you end up drained of any desire to get moving. You are defeating yourself by the way you kill yourself to get moving! Dr. Albert Ellis describes this mental trap as “musterbation.”

  Reformulate the way you tell yourself to do things by eliminating those coercive words from your vocabulary. An alternative to pushing yourself to get up in the morning would be to say, “It will make me feel better to get out of bed, even though it will be hard at first. Although I’m not obliged to, I might end up being glad I did. If, on the other hand, I’m really benefiting from the rest and relaxation, I may as well go ahead and enjoy it!” If you translate shoulds into wants, you will be treating yourself with a sense of respect. This will produce a feeling of freedom of choice and personal dignity. You will find that a reward system works better and lasts longer than a whip. Ask yourself, “What do I want to do? What course of action would be to my best advantage?” I think you will find that this way of looking at things will enhance your motivation.

  If you still have the desire to lie in bed, mope, and feel doubtful that getting up is really what you want to do, make a list of the advantages and disadvantages of staying in bed for another day. For example, an accountant who was far behind in his work around tax time found it hard to get up each day. His customers began to complain about the undone work, and in order to avoid these embarrassing confrontations, he lay in bed for weeks trying to escape, not even answering the phone. Many customers fired him, and his business began to fail.

  His mistake was in telling himself, “I know I should go to work but I don’t want to. And I don’t have to either! So I won’t!” Essentially, the word “should” created the illusion that the only reason for him to get out of bed was to please a bunch of angry, demanding customers. This was so unpleasant that he resisted. The absurdity of what he was doing to himself became apparent when he made a list of the advantages and disadvantages of staying in bed (Figure 5–9, above). After preparing this list, he realized it was to his advantage to get out of bed. As he subsequently became more involved with his work, his mood rapidly improved in spite of the fact that he had lost many accounts during the period of inactivity.

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  Figure 5–9.

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  Disarming Technique. Your sense of paralysis will be intensified if your family and friends are in the habit of pushing and cajoling you. Their nagging should statements reinforce the insulting thoughts already echoing through your head. Why is their pushy approach doomed to failure? It’s a basic law of physics that for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Any time you feel shoved, whether by someone’s hand actually on your chest or by someone trying to boss you around, you will naturally tighten up and resist so as to maintain your equilibrium and balance. You will attempt to exert your self-control and preserve your dignity by refusing to do the thing that you are being pushed to do. The paradox is that you often end up hurting yourself.

  It can be very confusing when someone obnoxiously insists you do something that actually would be to your advantage. This puts you in a “can’t win” situation because if you refuse to do what the person tells you, you end up defeating yourself just in order to spite him or her. In contrast, if you do what the person tells you to do, you feel had. Because you gave in to those pushy demands, you get the feeling the individual controlled you, and this robs you of self-respect. No one likes to be coerced.

  For example, Mary is a woman in her late teens who was referred to us by her parents after many years of depression. Mary was a real “hibernator,” and had the cap
acity to sit alone in her room watching TV soap operas for months at a time. This was due in part to her irrational belief that she looked “peculiar,” and that people would stare at her if she went out in public, and also by her feeling of being coerced by her domineering mother. Mary admitted that doing things might help her feel better, but this would mean giving in to her mother, who kept telling her to get off her duff and do something. The harder Mom pushed, the more stubbornly Mary resisted.

  It is an unfortunate fact of human nature that it can be extremely difficult to do something when you sense you are being forced into it. Fortunately, it’s very easy to learn how to handle people who nag and harangue you and try to run your life. Suppose you are Mary, and after thinking things over, you decide you would be better off if you got involved in doing a number of things. You’ve just made this decision when your mother comes into your bedroom and announces, “Don’t you lie around any longer! Your life is going down the drain. Get moving! Get involved in things the way the other girls your age do!” At that moment, in spite of the fact that you already have decided to do just that, you develop a tremendous aversion to it!

  The disarming technique is an assertive method that will solve this problem for you (other applications of this verbal maneuver will be described in the next chapter). The essence of the disarming technique is to agree with your mother, but to do so in a way that you remind her you are agreeing with her based on your own decision, and not because she was telling you what to do. So, you might answer this way: “Yes, Mom, I just thought the situation over myself and decided it would be to my advantage to get moving on things. Because of my own decision, I’m going to do it.” Now you can start doing things and not feel had. Or if you wish to put more of a barb in your comments, you can always say, “Yes, Mom, I have in fact decided to get out of bed in spite of the fact that you’ve been telling me to!”