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Ch. 2 The Triforce

One of the most effective forms of therapy for anxiety out there in shrink land is called cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT. CBT has lots of theories and techniques, but the one that I want you to focus on is called the “cognitive triangle”. It’s super simple… no really it is, check it out:

Now I’m gonna go off script here but for the audiobook. But I want you to picture a triangle on one corner you have feelings on one corner you have thoughts and on one corner you have behaviors. So, thoughts, feelings, behaviors feeling such behaviors in a triangle like that

There it is. The triforce of mental douchebaggery. Let’s break it down a bit. Basically what the cognitive triangle acknowledges is that your thoughts, feelings and behaviors all influence each other. If I asked you to imagine someone you love getting in a terrible car crash, it would probably make you feel pretty crappy. On the contrary, if I asked you to imagine opening your kitchen cabinet and suddenly $1,000,000 falling out, you’d probably feel pretty awesome. That is an example of how thoughts influence your feelings. See? Told you it was simple.

Let’s take it a step further. Say you had the deluge of cash fall on your head. Awesome right? Well maybe. Where did this money come from? With great cash comes great responsibility and now you have a fat stack of money from god knows where. If your thought is that maybe this is drug money hidden in your house by some ultra-violent drug cartel, you probably wouldn’t be on cloud nine anymore, which will in turn cause you to behave a certain way. You’re probably going to freak out and call the cops or something. If instead you remembered that you had entered a giveaway at the mall for $1,000,000, then you are likely going to attribute it to that and behave like a raving lunatic and hop around the room hootin’ and hollerin’. See what we did there? Your thoughts led to feelings, which then influenced your behavior. It’s not a difficult concept in general, but sometimes we don’t even know the ways that our thinking is influencing our feelings and behaviors.

Our thoughts might be loosely rooted in reality, but they sure as hell don’t always stay there. When you have unhelpful thinking that makes you feel crappy or act in ways that are not in line with your typical self, we refer to these thoughts as maladaptive cognitions or cognitive distortions. It’s a fancy way of describing thoughts that sabotage you. Like I said at the start, sometimes your brain is an asshole. There are a lot of different cognitive distortions, so this is certainly not an exhaustive list, but these are some of the most common. I’ll be really surprised if you don’t find yourself nodding along and saying, “Damn, that’s just like me,” as you read through these. Don’t freak out. Everyone engages in unhelpful thinking sometimes. It’s the amount and the effects of that thinking that matter.

Filtering: Some of you out there probably are superhuman at your ability to engage in this one. This is where you take the negative details about a situation and magnify them, while filtering out all of the positive features of the situation.

Example: You go on a date with someone and halfway through dinner, you excuse yourself to the bathroom and realize that you’ve had a dried up booger hanging out of your nose. Smooth move. For the rest of the night, you somehow feel like you are the biggest idiot ever and completely disgusting because of this natural bodily foible. The fact that you two share a passion for kittens, fed each other flirty bites of decadent dessert, and plan on going another date in the future is completely dwarfed by your dwelling on that stupid freaking booger.

Overgeneralization: You already know this one. This is where we take one event or piece of evidence and jump to a general conclusion. Your brain is a terrible scientist.

Example: You are taking a full load of classes and in the midst of some family drama happening at home, you totally bomb your midterm for that one class that you hate with the instructor that smells like soup. From this point on, you know for certain that you’re a bad student because you screwed up on that midterm. Don’t worry about the fact that you still have a pretty great GPA and really won’t do that bad in the class when all is said and done…

Polarized thinking: This one we can blame daisies for. Remember, “He loves me. He loves me not?” How come we don’t say, “He loves me. He’s into me. He doesn’t like my friends. He wants to be just friends. He doesn’t swing that way. He’s not sure yet, but he is having a good time at the moment”? You get the point. Not everything is black and white, but when you engage in polarized thinking, there are no such things as shades of grey (not the book…perv).

Example: You group your personal or work projects into successes and failures. If you reached the end goal it was a success, if you didn’t it was a failure. Despite the fact that you can gain a lot of insight and skills from the process of pursuing a goal and ultimately not reaching it the first time, you didn’t make it and that’s all the matters… right?

Catastrophizing: Basically being a drama queen/king. This one makes you overthink and magnify the effects that a situation has on you. Picture the soccer players that flop like theatrical fish when they barely get brushed by an opposing player. Playa, please.

Example: You went to the doctor and found out that, in their opinion, your BMI is higher than it should be based on the charts for your age and height. Surely this means that you are obese and will likely get diabetes, never run that marathon you’ve dreamed of, and ultimately die alone…

Shoulds: This one can also go by oughts or musterbation, as Albert Ellis coined. Basically, you direct “should statements” at yourself that make you feel really bad. You should be patient, you should be reliable, you should get along well with others… you see where this is going. This is a common thing that people actually think is a good strategy for self-discipline, but it seems to backfire more often than not.

Example: In accordance with your New Year’s resolutions, you have told yourself that you should not eat donuts. When you do this, you start to think of yourself as someone who shouldn’t eat donuts and further, as someone who is better because they don’t eat donuts (damn, I want a donut right now). What happens when you slip, fall and your mouth lands around a delicious donut? You feel like utter garbage, because you told yourself that it was something that you must not do instead of being more realistic and telling yourself that it’s something that you want to do, but will try to avoid for the sake of your physical well-being. We all know shit happens, and musterbation only compounds the bad feelings that you get after “falling off the wagon.”

Mind Reading: Yeah, I’m talking to you. This is one that MANY of us are guilty of. Mind reading is very much what it sounds like. You assume that you know a person’s thoughts or internal motives, even though in reality you are just taking guesses.

Example: You text your significant other saying how much you love them and that you are really happy that things have been great lately. You ask them if they want to go to a movie later. I’m talking super cutesy with emojis and everything. Five minutes later, you get the response, “K.” That’s it, just… K. When you see your partner later you say, “So you don’t want to go to the movies?” You’re already pissed because you assume that they don’t care as much as you given their lackluster response. If they cared as much, they would have used an equivalent number of emojis… duh. In reality, they were just driving on the freeway and cared enough about you to not get killed by texting while driving.

Fortune Telling: This is a close relative of mind reading. The difference is that in fortune telling, you are assuming that you can predict the future and outcome of a given situation. In reality, it’s most often impossible to know the outcome of a situation until it has already passed.

Example: Say you are a musician and you have a gig coming up tonight. You may have prepared plenty and your set list is on point, but you have yourself convinced that you are going to bomb and that everyone in that city sucks. I bet you aren’t feeling too hot or treating the people around you very nicely. In fact, that might even lead to you blowing it hard at your gig where you otherwise might have killed it. Hmmm… curious indeed.

Personalizing: Personalizing sucks. This is that little trick your brain does where you attribute a personal meaning to things that actually have absolutely nothing to do with you.

Example: Mom comes home. You ask how her day was and you notice a strange inflection in her voice. You assume that it obviously has something to do with you and are left wondering for the rest of the night what the heck you did to make her so annoyed at you. In reality, her boss chewed her out right before she left work about something that was someone else’s fault.

Alright. That’s about enough of those for now. Like I said before, if you found that you have engaged in a few or even all of those patterns of thinking, you are not alone. We all do. I’m sure you can start to see how engaging in these messed up thoughts a little bit too much could lead you down some stressful roads. There is something you can start doing right now that will help you grab negative thinking by the balls. It’s as easy as ABC.

You might be reading this on a Kindle or whatever, but you should probably grab a piece of paper for this next part. Or you can just use your laptop, tablet, etc., which is probably sitting right next to you as well. You technojunkie. I am going to take you through an exercise that is mega simple, but super effective. It’s helped a great deal of my clients and friends who have been patient enough to put up with me. It’s called an ABC thought log and it basically takes that cognitive triangle and uses it to break down a situation into its component parts, so that you can see where you shooting yourself in the foot. Grasping the concept is simple. Mastering it takes a little practice. Start off by drawing a little grid like this:

Now I want you to think for a bit about a situation recently that made you anxious. Got it? Sweet. So go ahead and put the event that happened up in the A box. I will play along with you here and fill in my own situation in my thought log. So in the A section of the box, I will put that my friend texted me and said that we needed to talk. That’s it, just the event that caused the stress in the first place.

Next, you’re going to hop down to the C portion because you’re a rebel and fuck the alphabet anyways. The C part is for you to write down what you felt in that situation. Try to avoid using thinking words, and instead just describe how it made you feel. In my case I felt worried, scared, and frantic. You’re probably wondering how I hopped from my A all the way to my very dramatic C. Well, that is exactly what you should be wondering, because that is what we need to fill into the B section: our thoughts about the situation. In my example, this friend was someone that has some pretty serious health issues and I thought the bastard was trying to die on me.

Let’s pull back the curtain a little bit. A = Activating event, B = Beliefs, and C = emotional Consequence. If my friend let me know that we need to talk in a vacuum without any other influences, it would not be a bad thing in and of itself. Unfortunately, that’s not how things work and instead, my jerk of a noggin had to interpret the event through the lens of my beliefs about the situation. Since I think that he is calling to tell me that he’s dying, I’m sure as hell going to feel pretty crappy.

Take a second to look through the cognitive distortions that I defined a little earlier. Can you see any of them that seem similar to my beliefs in this situation? I’m definitely engaging in a little bit of fortune telling. I don’t know what he is going to tell me, but that’s not stopping me from emotionally reacting with stress and anxiety. I’m probably doing a little bit of catastrophizing too, since he’s really been in pretty good health lately. Do the same thing for your Bs. See if you can identify some of those maladaptive thought patterns. I bet you can. I encourage you to write them down as well next to what you wrote in the B section.

The next step in using a thought log like this is to challenge your negative thinking patterns. Pretend like you’re a lawyer and your brain is on the stand. You get to ask it questions and hopefully reveal that it is guilty of sabotaging your sanity. How are you sure that he wants to tell you that he’s dying? Has he ever wanted to talk about other important things? Did you have something that you are working on together that might have hit a snag? Once you develop a few good alternatives to your unhelpful belief, try them on for size.

Scratch out your original B and instead put in an alternative. In my case, I can replace, “I think he’s dying,” with, “He screwed up on our project and we are back to the drawing board.” Does that change anything? Sure it does. Now my C is boiling rage and anger instead of anxiety. Not that much better. Let’s try another. Maybe he wanted my advice about a new girl that he is seeing, because he knows that my game is hella tight. That actually makes my C transform into positive things like happiness and pride. Much better.

It is important to evaluate the likelihood of each of your alternate possibilities. Sure, you can plug in the B that you’re going to suddenly going to win a zillion dollars, but that’s not really going to change your mood too much unless the percentage likelihood of that actually occurring is at least moderately high. The beauty of this process is that much of the time, our beliefs that lead to anxiety (or depression for that matter) are distorted and off base. At the very least, they are hugely magnified versions of the real thing. I encourage you to try this process out with your own ABCs. Be a scientist and develop a few alternative hypotheses. What else could be true about the situation that might not be as upsetting? In other words, how can you replace that bitch of B with something more realistic and less self-sabotaging?

This may seem simple, but trust me when I say that it takes some practice and that when it is used consistently, it’s a crazy powerful tool. The trick is repetition. You need to use this technique so many times that it seeps into your bones. When you first start doing this, it serves as more of an intellectual exercise. The brain a nifty organ, but it’s also a lazy ass one. It is great at learning new skills, grouping large bits of information, and forging new pathways. Once it’s built those synaptic shortcuts, though, it can’t be bothered to listen to your silly notions of change and progress. This means that you really have to beat it into submission. You need to say, “Hey, asshole. I don’t care if you want to or not. We are going to keep thinking this way until you get the hang of it.” Once you force feed it knowledge like that consistently over time, you will internalize the process and apply it to your life instantly without even realizing it. Real change can happen using this technique, I promise.

So here’s the thing. This technique is effective, but not it’s not perfect for everyone. We are all different and for some of us, our anxiety is not cognitively driven (driven by thoughts), but it is somatically (physically) driven. What good is working through the ABCs if you can’t even identify any particular activating event? Sometimes your heart and mind seem to start racing for no apparent reason and you are left sitting in the parking lot trying to cool your damn jets before you can even get out of the car. If you are like that, then this next chapter is for you.