ABCDE – Consequences

ABCDE for Successful Mind Management: Consequences

1. Identify the Feeling

Illogical or irrational thinking is often felt through its consequence, a negative, unpleasant feelings. Because automatic irrational thinking can be hard to catch, it is easier to pay close attention to your feelings. Feelings tend to last much longer than thoughts and focusing attention on your feelings enables you to track down the thoughts responsible.

Pay close attention to your thinking whenever you experience one of the following feelings: anger, guilt, depression, hopelessness, sadness, loneliness, frustration, nervousness, envy, jealousy, and so on. Use the presence of a feeling you don’t like as a reminder to stop and examine your thinking.

Look for the following footprints to irrational thoughts.

anger

guilt depression, hopelessness

frightened, nervous

jealous, envious

worried, restless

irritable, uptight

Try to use the presence of these feelings as cues or triggers for stopping and looking at your thinking.

ABCDE – Beliefs

ABCDE for Successful Mind Management: Beliefs

Identify the Error/ Irrational thought.

A lot of thinking is so automatic and habitual that it takes a some effort to catch identify and examine them. Persistence for a week or two will teach you that your thinking is much more predictable than you have previously thought. Listen to what people around you say; and try to catch instances of irrational thinking in their speech. You will be surprised to see how often it occurs, and how often it is associated with negative and unpleasant feelings, problems, failures and losses.

To target the error, you might ask yourself the following questions:

“What is the evidence for what I thought?”

How do you know what you think is right?

Do others agree with what you think?

“What’s another interpretation for this?”

Is this the only way of looking at things?

Is my point of view biased or distorted in some way?

EXAMPLES

Thought: “I blew it again! This always happens! I’ll never be able to do it! I’m hopeless.

No. 3 Error: Over generalising (from one mistake to a sweeping condemnation of your whole personality).

Thought: “No-one here is talking to me. They must all think I’m stupid. I must look really nervous.”

No. 4 Error: Mind reading (you cannot tell what others are thinking).

Thought: “Oh no! This is terrible! Awful!’

No. 5 Error: Catastrophising (it is really that bad? Has someone just died, or have you just found out that you have cancer?)

Thought: “I just know that these chest pains mean that I’m going to have a heart attack and die”.

No. 2 Error: Black-and-white thinking (chest pains don’t always mean a heart attack).

ABCDE – Activating Events

ABCDE for Successful Mind Management: Activating Events

Identify the Trigger
The trigger or activating event may be visual, auditory, a smell, other feelings that sets in motion a chain that leads to you feeling bad.

What was the A of the sequence?

It was possibly stimulated by something somebody said or did, or a memory that you just had. You need to look for such words or memories as the following:

Words like “should”, “ought”, “must”, “have to”

The words “never” and “always”

Phrases starting with “what if…” and “if only…”

A key word or a small phrase

Words that make you feel discouraged and helpless

A brief mental picture, either a memory or an imagined future that makes you feel bad.



Write down that event now:

ABCDE Model

ABCDE Model for Successful Mind Management

Irrational thinking, irrational beliefs and automatic thoughts. By now you are getting an understanding of how your thinking creates anxiety, leads you away from success and attracts more negatives into your life. You may be asking how do I change it? There are four main steps to challenging irrational thinking, and eventually changing our thinking.

In this model we add two more steps to the original ABC Model

A Activating Event

B Belief

C Consequence

D Dispute

E Exercise and Evaluate

IDENTIFYING AND CHANGING IRRATIONAL THINKING

This isn’t always an easy thing to do because automatic thoughts can happen very fast, and you’ve developed the habit of not paying attention to them. This means that in the early stages of embarking on this, you’re going to forget to do it quite often, and will inevitably catch yourself doing the same old thing and making the same old mistake, with the same old unpleasant or negative consequences.

When this happens, it’s important that you don’t allow all your motivation and good intentions to slowly deflate, like air hissing out of a punctured tyre. The mental attitude with which you approach this task is all-important. You must never think of it as a “battle”, because this implies that there is some part of you that needs to somehow be put down, or suppressed, or punished, or banished. In reality, the “irrational thinker” is just another aspect of you, as is the “anxious worrier”. You simply need to realize that the problem is that you pay far too much attention to these negative parts of yourself, and ignore your good qualities and assets.

You need to focus on these positive times when you do catch yourself in mid-habit, and congratulate yourself on your wins, no matter how small or insignificant. Focus on when you do have a success, rather than on your failures.

Instead of criticizing yourself for all those times you forgot, congratulate yourself now on realizing the need to remember. This takes the “battle” element out of it. You are no longer “fighting” part of yourself (an impossible task); your mind is starting to work properly for a change. Pay attention to how good that makes you feel inside. Notice how that sort of pleasure can be very deep, because it comes from within yourself and not from others. There is a special sort of lasting satisfaction to be gained from learning to list those good feelings we have about ourselves when we know we’ve done our best.

Steps to identify and Challenge Irrational Thoughts

Identify the Consequences

Identify the Trigger

Identify the Error/Irrational Thought

Disputing

Exercise

Cognitive Distortions – Arbitrary Inference

Arbitrary Inference

This is the process of drawing a specific conclusion when there is no evidence to support it or the evidence is to the contrary to what you have concluded.

Cognitive Distortions – Personalisation

Personalisation

If you use this type of distortion you tend relate external events to yourself when there is no reason to make those connections.

Cognitive Distortions – Selective Abstraction

Cognitive Distortions – Selective Abstraction

Selective Abstraction: focusing upon only one feature of a situation, take it out of context and ignoring other, more salient features.

From there we conceptualise the the whole situation on the basis of this fragment of the experience.

Cognitive Distortions – Black and White Thinking

Cognitive Distortions – Black and White Thinking

Black and White or dichotomous thinking: thinking and talking in extreme either/or terms.
If we use this for of distortion we have the tendency to put all our experiences into one of two opposite groups.

eg all good or all bad – the saint or the sinner, clever or dumb and so on.

Cognitive Distortions – Global Labeling

Cognitive Distortions – Global Labeling

When you use Global Labels you assign generalized and usually negative labels to people, including yourself.

eg  They’re all idiots

The way to overcome this is to be more specific.

Who is They? Who specifically is an idiot?

What specifically did that person do that, in your view, made them an idiot?

eg John is an idiot because he forgot my birthday.

Does John alway forget your birthday?   NO

Does he normally forget everything?  NO

All the time?  NO

So rephrased John forgot my birthday but he is usually thoughtful perhaps he had something else on his mind.

Put yourself in his position and generate some alternative reasons for his behaviour. You will be less harsh on him as you may understand him better.

You can apply the same process to yourself and perhaps you will be less harsh on yourself.

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Cognitive Distortions – Over Generalisation

Cognitive Distortions – Overgeneralisation

Over-generalisation: making general statements and conclusions on the basis of isolated cases.

This means you say to yourself that if it is true for one case then it is true for all cases even if it is only slightly similar.

A classic example I hear is:  ”Men! They’re all the same”

To overcome being an overgeneralist you have to establish criteria for which cases are similar and to what degree.

Well, men have XY chromosomes, they have testosterone but not all have the same levels, they dont all have jobs, they dont all fight, they dont all drink, do drugs, think the same things, feel the same way or behave the same way. Thus we need to specify what it is we actually mean. In what way are they all the same specifically?

Until next time reduce your generalisations and have more room for specifically happy thoughts.

Nevin

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