Whether it’s to reduce worry levels or to lead a happier life, our cognitions should work for us and not against us. But mere decision to forcefully change our thoughts won’t make us feel better instantly. It is our cognitive distortions that we need to identify before we can decide on any meaningful action towards happiness.

We all have cognitive faults in our thinking that are not supporting our happiness. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) teaches us that in order to feel better, we need to think better.
The first step towards total control is to catch our automated thoughts and identify any distortions in the process. Whether it’s black & white thinking, filtering, generalising, labelling or catastrophising; the main thing is to be completely aware of their existence.

Once you have captured your dominant cognitive distortions, then you can start the disputing process which is simply an exercise of a few questions to take your mind back to the present moment and find a more realistic view of your current situation.

How can you do that? Please see below an action plan that would be beneficial in this process:

1) Acknowledge the existence of unrealistic thoughts in your mind

We have millions of thoughts popping into our head every day and we tend to accept all of them as valid. This means that even the negative and unrealistic thoughts are regarded as true in our minds. We need to be aware that not our thoughts are worth accepting as some of them may not serve us but are actually causing damage in our emotional world. Identifying the thoughts that are making us upset are the ones that we need to pay close attention to.

2) Find evidences against your unrealistic thoughts

Once the thoughts that are on the unrealistic edge of our thinking are identified, we can then start to work with the different type of distortions. Whether it’s about positive or negative generalisations, we need to remind ourselves that we mostly live in the grey area as not everything is black or white in our lives. And while most of us can imagine the worst case scenarios in several different happenings, the worst rarely happens and most of our worries would not manifest in the real world at all. Acknowledging these facts is the first step towards a happier life as these truths help us bringing back our thoughts to a more realistic state. Once you have identified your cognitive distortions you can be in the position to take action and to dispute the thoughts that are popping into your mind. This involves the process of challenging yourself with several questions to ascertain whether your thinking has reached an unrealistic dimension. Asking ‘Can I see that there can be more than two outcomes of this situation?’ is a useful example question to challenge black and white thinking as it identifies the limitations this distortion is imposing in our minds and helps to realise that life is not revolving around the two extremes only. It is also important to assess how the unrealistic thoughts making you feel – identifying the impact these thoughts have on your emptional wellbeing is paramount to be aware of faulty our cognition is.

3) Do a honest risk assessment of your thoughts

In business, the base of risk assessment is to judge the likelihood of the risk and its impact in order to evaluate how it affects the holistic view. As part of this, you need to bring your unrealistic thought into a realistic state (as outlined above in point 2) and then independently assess how these thoughts scale in the impact/likelihood scale. How likely that the worry will materialise? How much impact would it have on you? This is a prerequisite to proceed with the next essential step.

4) Manage the identified risks

During this phase, you have a couple of options, the first is to identify what can go wrong (what is the worst scenario) and to determine whether this risk is worth dealing with. If the answer is yes, then the next step is to create mitigating plans to deal with the materialised risks and create contingency plans to deal with the possible risks should they become real events. These actions would ensure that you would be fully prepared for any potential threats and so your life is not affected harshly by any of these risks. In terms of catastrophising, you can identify people who can help you if the worst happens which is another way of comforting your mind that you are not alone in the world.

5) Assess how you feel after this exercise

Put your mind back to the original worry – how do you feel now? How would you evaluate the feeling you had before the exercise? Can you now see a more realistic perspective of the situation? Do you feel more at ease and comfortable?

This exercise makes sure you can put your unrealistic thoughts into a different light and so you can feel better after the holistic evaluation