Much of our communication in the early 21st century is done via social media: texting, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, etc.
I find these various communication forms fascinating from a neuroscience perspective. Since many of them replace face-to-face interactions or even phone conversations, they sometimes lack aspects of communication that are crucial for us to understand each other: facial expression, body language, and voice intonation.1
So we add those crucial aspects of communication back in with the use of emojis – happy faces, sad faces, mad or disgusted faces, even the emoji version of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”2 to denote terror.
We may not always understand the words of a text message, perhaps because it’s poorly phrased or because we are unsure of the writer’s intent (irony? sarcasm? literalism?). But an emoji is never ambivalent. Somehow it makes a message’s meaning crystal clear, even if it is written in Sanskrit.
My point is this. Emotions are an integral point of our mental processing. And emotional expressions are helpful for us to understand and interact with the world in appropriate ways. While we feel very intense, negative emotions during depressive and anxiety disorders, the emotions themselves are not usually the core issue. Rather, they are the emotional manifestations of underlying cognitive distortions that need to be corrected.
There is one exception to this. It has to do with believing that our emotions always accurately reflect reality. This is distortion #8: emotional reasoning.
Cognitive Distortion #8: Emotional Reasoning
So far in this 101 series, we have talked about how activating events are filtered through a set of beliefs that then result in specific emotions. Emotional reasoning works in the opposite direction. We feel a specific emotion, maybe sadness, anger, or anxiety. Since it is only natural to wonder why we feel this way, our minds work backward to create a belief, a version of reality, that makes sense with the emotion.
You can see how a cycle might begin to form in which the belief subsequently reinforces the emotion, which reinforces the belief, and so on.
Consider the following examples:3
- “I feel like a failure. Therefore I must be a failure.”
- “I feel guilty. Therefore I must be a horrible person.”
- “I feel inadequate. Therefore I must be worthless.”
- “I feel overwhelmed and hopeless. Therefore my problems must be impossible to solve.”
- “I feel anxious. Therefore I must be in danger.”
- “I feel angry. Therefore the world must have done me wrong.”
- “I feel too tired and upset to exercise today. Therefore I will skip my workout.”
- “I feel too tired and upset to work today. Therefore I will stay in bed.”
- “I feel like I will never recover from depression. Therefore I never will recover.”
Emotions are helpful to explain current events, but they should not be allowed to dictate or create them. In an example from a CBT training manual,4 a patient is speaking to his therapist about his fear of flying. The patient says, “I feel very tense and jittery when I think about my upcoming flight.”
The therapist asks, “How do you relate your fear of flying to feeling jittery?”
The patient responds, “When I feel jittery, I think something terrible is about to happen, like the plane is going to crash.”
“It sounds like you use your feelings of tension and anxiety as evidence that the plane is about to crash. But are they? Are they hard proof that something terrible is about to happen?”
“No, they are just my feelings.”
Letting our emotions dictate our perception of reality is somewhat like letting the tail wag the dog. In order to make this point, the therapist challenges the mental link the patient has made between his feelings and the flight’s safety. In essence, the therapist is saying that our perspective should be informed, rather than coerced, by our emotions.
The therapist then instructs the patient to try to search beyond his feelings for hard evidence that the flight will be dangerous. While such evidence does exist (we’ve all heard of plane crashes, and maybe have even personally known plane crash victims), there is also evidence to suggest that plane crashes are the exception rather than the rule. Taking all available information into account allows us to make more accurate, rational decisions about what is or is not dangerous or threatening in our environment.
The Main Problems of Emotional Reasoning
Emotional reasoning decreases motivation for change
It can take a tremendous amount of hard work to achieve our professional and personal goals, like finishing graduate school, getting a promotion, fighting an addiction, losing weight, and/or getting into better physical shape. But emotional reasoning can make us feel defeated in life even before we begin to fight. Our feelings sometimes act like screaming mimis5 in our heads, circling around each of these important goals and shrieking, “It’s no use! You can’t do this! You are bound to fail!” Such discouraging feelings can quickly deplete our motivation for change. Emotional reasoning is thus a primary reason why people remain locked in destructive lifestyles. Living according to the dictates of our emotions has been directly linked to major lifestyle-related problems in society today, including binge-eating and obesity6 and addiction.7
Emotional reasoning produces procrastination
The cycle of emotional reasoning also leads to procrastination and progresses into a worse malady that Dr. David Burns calls “Do-Nothingism.”8
We all know what garden-variety procrastination is like. We don’t feel up to doing something, so we put it off until “tomorrow” – an entirely relative term that can mean next week, next month, or 5 years from now.
It’s easy to see how lack of motivation feeds into this. It starts with our self-defeating thoughts, like, “There’s really no point in doing this. I’m bound to mess it up, anyway. I might as well rest until I feel up to tackling this job.”
Such self-defeating thoughts result in self-defeating emotions: we feel overwhelmed, discouraged, fearful of failure, and helpless. As a consequence, we mope around the house or even stay in bed, convinced that it’s worthless to even try. These self-defeating actions just make us feel worse about ourselves and trigger feelings of shame and self-loathing. We become even more discouraged and slip further into inaction and avoidance. The self-defeating feelings and actions thus feed back and trigger more self-defeating thoughts. Dr. Burns calls this the Lethargy Cycle.
Do you have the distortion of Emotional Reasoning?
If you have ever allowed your emotions to dictate your thoughts and resulting actions (or lack of action), then you have this distortion.
It’s only natural to feel the swelling of emotion once in a while. We all can be swayed by such feelings. The key to overcoming this distortion, however, is to hold up each feeling to the light of accuracy.9
What is the solution to Emotional Reasoning?
The following tips may be helpful in keeping our emotions in their proper place:
- Feelings are just feelings.
- Feelings do not dictate self-worth.
- Feelings do not dictate present circumstances.
- Feelings do not dictate the future.
The first tip is deceptively simple: we need to remember that feelings are just feelings. They provide a snapshot of our emotional reaction to the external world around us and our internal state at any given moment. This can be helpful information, but only within the context of ALL available information. Feelings do NOT necessarily accurately reflect the world around us, nor do they even necessarily reflect our internal state.
Feelings do not dictate self-worth. If I were to say to you, “I feel like a sack of garbage,” you would know better than to take me literally. The fact that I express my feelings with a stinky metaphor does not actually make me a sack of garbage. This is classic emotional reasoning in action. Having a rotten, miserable internal state does not prove that I am, or you are, a rotten, miserable person, merely that we feel we are.10
Our self-worth is an unchanging quality that does not depend on our emotional state. So the next time you find yourself thinking, “I am such a worthless, pathetic human being,” ask yourself, “What hard evidence do I have to back that belief?” If your pieces of evidence are based on your feelings or on a type of cognitive distortion, then they are not really evidence.
Feelings do not dictate present circumstances. Emotions provide helpful information to our present reality. For example, fear can alert us to a danger that is actually there, and regret can motivate us to try to improve our performance. But emotions should be seen as helpful tools we use to shape our actions, not as the driving force behind them.
Feelings do not dictate the future. Feeling unmotivated does not mean that we have to fall into the traps of procrastination and do-nothingism. Dr. Burns provides several tools to defeat these self-defeating behaviors.11 Here is a (very) brief list:
- Write down a list of tasks you have been putting off because they seem too difficult.
- Try to predict the difficulty of each task, as well as the satisfaction you expect to feel in completing the task.
- After you complete the task, record its actual level of difficulty and your actual level of satisfaction. You will probably find that overestimated the former and underestimated the latter.
- Write down all your reasons for procrastinating on a task. Next to each reason, write a “rebuttal” for why you should do it, anyway.
- If you feel that nothing you do is worth doing because you are a worthless person, write down all the negative thoughts you are telling yourself. Next to each thought, identify the cognitive distortion involved and replace it with a rational thought.
Conclusion and Action Steps
At the end of every one of the cognitive distortions, I am tempted to write the same thing: don’t beat yourself for falling for this one, because we all have been there. This is especially true of emotional reasoning, though, because we all have emotions and mistake them for reality from time to time.
Here are some action steps to try to avoid emotional reasoning:
- Write down your own list of “I feel” statements. Next to each “I feel” statement, write down what you would say to a loved one who was expressing the same thoughts to you. Then, apply each rebuttal to yourself.
- Write down (somewhere where you will see it every day): “Feelings are just feelings. They do not dictate my self-worth, my present, or my future.”
- Use at least one of the anti-procrastination tips above.
1 Mehrabian, A. (1971). Nonverbal communication. In Nebraska symposium on motivation. University of Nebraska Press.
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scream.
3 Burns, D. D. (2009). Feeling good. New York: Harper Publishing. p.38-39.
4 Leahy, R. L. (2017). Cognitive therapy techniques: A practitioner’s guide. Guilford Publications.
5 Nickname for rocket artillery used by both American and German troops in WWII.
6 Devonport, T. J., Nicholls, W., & Fullerton, C. (2017). A systematic review of the association between emotions and eating behaviour in normal and overweight adult populations. Journal of health psychology, 1359105317697813.
7 Parolin, M., Simonelli, A., Cristofalo, P., Sacco, M., Bacciardi, S., Maremmani, A. G., … & Cerniglia, L. (2017). Drug addiction and emotional dysregulation in young adults. Heroin Addict Relat Clin Probl, 19(3), 37-48.
8 Burns, D. D. (2009). Feeling good. New York: Harper Publishing. pp.81-131.
9 Nedley, N. A. (2011). The lost art of thinking: How to improve emotional intelligence and achieve peak mental performance. Oklahoma: Nedley Publishing. p.119.
10 Burns, D. D. (2009). Feeling good. New York: Harper Publishing. p.79.
11 Burns, D. D. (2009). Feeling good. New York: Harper Publishing. pp.128-129.
Dr. Pamela Coburn-Litvak has published research articles on exercise and stress in Neuroscience and Neurobiology of Learning and Behavior. Her latest book, Leaving the Shadowland of Stress, Anxiety, and Depression, was published in 2020.
After receiving a Ph.D. in Neurobiology and Behavior from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, she served as both Assistant Professor of Physiology & Pharmacology and Special Assistant to the Vice President for Research Affairs at Loma Linda University in Loma Linda, California. She then joined the Biology department at Andrews University and developed courses in human physiology as well as the neurobiology of mental illness. She also founded Rock @ Science LLC, a company that specializes in health and science education and web development. She co-developed the brain and body physiology segment of the Stress: Beyond Coping seminar with its creator, Dr. William “Skip” MacCarty, DMin.
Dr. Coburn-Litvak currently lives in California with her husband. Their two daughters are mostly grown and attending school elsewhere.
When she’s not studying or teaching about stress, she enjoys stress-relieving activities like puttering around the garden, taking nature walks with her family, knitting, cooking, and reading.