"Cognitive restructuring" isn't as culturally popular as its therapy-speak peers, like "toxic" and "gaslighting," but it's a powerful tool pros use to help people adjust their thoughts. Though it's usually something you go over in therapy, you can still employ some principles of cognitive restructuring in your everyday life to stay more upbeat and productive.
What is cognitive restructuring?
The American Psychological Association (APA) defines cognitive restructuring as “a skill for carefully examining your thinking when you are feeling upset or distressed about something.” The goal is to change how you think in moments of stress so that your thoughts can become more balanced. You want to be less subjective, more objective, and overall less influenced by negativity. Here, the stressful thoughts you may experience are considered cognitive distortions and aren’t helpful for your overall wellbeing or productivity. In fact, they can be downright unhelpful, holding you back from getting things done.
Negative feelings associated with certain actions or events can stall your progress, which can lead to more negative feelings as your tasks pile up. Whether you’re too sad to clean, too anxious to run to the store, or too stressed to do your work, addressing the negative feelings head-on and restructuring them can help you move past the hump and get it all done in a way that still feels safe—and even good. When you feel good, your thoughts are good, and when your thoughts are good, you keep going and getting even more done. Negative thoughts beget more negativity, and the same is generally true of positivity. You just have to figure out how to make the switch, which is what cognitive restructuring is for.
Five steps to practicing cognitive restructuring
Here’s what you do, per the APA:
Write down the situation that's upsetting you, whether it’s an actual event (like cleaning your house, doing your schoolwork, or having to talk to someone you don't like) or a memory of an event. You just need a one-sentence description.
Identify the most upsetting feeling you have. Even if you have a lot of feelings, pick the strongest one. It may help you to categorize them into fear and anxiety; sadness and depression; guilt and shame; or anger. Keep the strongest feeling in mind for the rest of the steps.
Identify your thoughts about the event or situation as they relate to your strongest feeling. If your strongest feeling is fear, ask yourself what you’re afraid of. If it’s guilt, ask yourself what “bad” thing you’ve actually done. This is where you get specific as you try to get at the root cause of your negative feeling. So, if you’re anxious about studying for a test and keep putting it off, identify what you’re afraid of (like not understanding the material or getting a bad grade). Write the thought out in full: “I feel anxious about studying because I am worried I won’t understand or retain enough information to do well on the test.”
Here, evaluate the accuracy of your upsetting thought. Start with any evidence that could support the thought, then probe it. Why do you think you won’t understand or retain the material you have to study? Write down any evidence, but then ask yourself why your thought might be wrong, too. Explore the evidence against the thought, including other ways of looking at the situation, what someone else might think about it, and whether your feelings are based on facts.
Once you’ve listed all the evidence for and against your negative thought, make an ultimate decision, placing the most weight on the strongest and most objective information. Cross out anything weak, subjective, or based in feelings; circle anything substantiated by hard evidence.
The steps here remind me of a reading comprehension and studying technique called elaborative interrogation. There, you identify a fact that you need to study and understand, like that a historical event took place. After that, you ask questions: Who was there? What happened? When did it happen? Where did it happen? What was going on in that region on at the time? Why was that happening? Why did this lead to the event? How did it happen? How did it impact everything that happened next? You look up the answers to all those questions until you know every detail of context about the fact. By that time, you know so much that the fact itself—the simple, straightforward thing you need to know for your test or whatever you're studying for—is so obvious as to become laughable. Of course the historical event happened—look at all the things that led up to and went into it! Cognitive restructuring is similar: You identify your fact, which in this case is the distressing thing, then dive deep on what you're afraid of, why you feel that way, when you last completed that task, etc. Going over it in an interrogative way helps you move to a point of deeper understanding, then helps you move right past it.
Doing this when you feel immobilized by anxiety or sadness can help you see a path forward. If you do it enough, dismissing negativity and focusing instead on facts—like that you’ve aced tests before or that you’ve maintained your house’s cleanliness in the past, or that doing badly on a test or having an untidy home don’t make you an all-around bad person—will come more naturally. Best of all, you can prove the facts right by then getting the tasks done, strengthening them for next time. The self-reinforcing nature of the good feelings and productivity that go along with this process is what makes it effective, so the first time you try, keep your eyes on the light at the end of the tunnel. It will get easier the more you do it.
