Cognitive Restructuring Techniques For Greater Happiness
How you think about problems matters a lot
Does thinking about your problems cause lots of stress? Do you feel overwhelmed when facing a life challenge? Hoping to find strategies to help you feel more empowered?
If the answer is yes, you’ve come to the right place. That’s because I’d like to share with you ten cognitive restructuring techniques designed to reduce your stress and generate greater happiness.
Some of these may seem like no-brainers. Others may cause you to pause and reflect.
1. Avoid the playing the blame game
It takes courage to recognize that you are responsible for the many challenges you meet. Even if someone’s mean, how you view circumstances is up to you.
When you blame another person, you let them control your well-being. It’s far better to take charge of your destiny.
Accept culpability and you have the power to improve your life.
2. Create new mental pictures for stressful events
Whatever you picture stays alive in your mind. You feed memories when you go over them and focus on the worst parts.
As you do so, you revive painful emotions and deepen neural pathways in your brain that help you return to angst.
If you can’t stop creating mental images of unwanted memories, play with what you see. Change them from color to black and white., or think of a place you find calming.
Put a frame around them. Shrink them and add a silly cartoon character voice to lighten the mood and the pictures may fade.
3. Recognize life lessons
Everyone must deal with problems. Happy people consider setbacks stepping-stones to their greatest achievements. Without them, they wouldn’t discover what to do or increase resilience.
Think of problems as life lessons. As long as you learn from them, they are valuable. That is what experience is and how you grow resilience!
4. Talk about what works
The saying “it’s good to talk” isn’t always true. Sometimes it’s better to sit in silence and seek inner wisdom rather than tell everyone your problems.
When you talk about difficulties often, you focus on negativity.
Before you can feel better, you must alter your mood. So, leave unproductive exchanges with pals for times when they offer wise advice unless you want to stay unhappy.
5. Know your problems won’t last
Some challenges seem huge at the time you meet them. You think they will never leave. All situations change however. Even those you want to stay the same will alter over time.
Your problems will shift, and in a few weeks or months you may wonder why they upset you in the first place.
Bear this idea in mind when you face troubles and train yourself to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
How do you think about your problems?
6. Encourage helpful conversations
Doesn’t it feel great when people agree with you? Nonetheless, do you really want your confidants to approve of the reasons you give about why you should be unhappy?
Rather than strive to get friends to agree with you and strengthen your misery, ask them to help you recover. Seek wise counsel from people who offer fresh perspectives.
7. Consider solutions
Never hang your hopes on one solution. If you think there’s only a single way to solve problems, you narrow your vision of what might be and miss opportunities to manage well.
When in debt, for instance, a bank loan isn’t the only way out. Maybe you can sell something, start a small business, or borrow funds from a family member.
Think big. Consider there must be plenty of ways to deal with problems. Brainstorm ideas.
Jot them in a notepad even when they seem silly, and you’ll come up with ways to cope and improve.
8. Understand you are not alone
However strange the problem you face, you’re not alone. Many people are going through similar difficulties now and plenty will later too.
If you don’t know how to cope, find out how other people deal with similar difficulties and learn from their mistakes and successes.
9. Trust your inner voice
Many people who love to give advice will appear out of the blue if you talk about your problems. Their way of coping, however, may not suit you and they might offer bad advice.
Follow guidance only if it’s useful and after carefully looking at other measures.
People might offer sensible counsel, but discount advice from individuals who insist you do as they say. Only you know what’s best for you.
10. Let go when it’s time
People sometimes cling to the past. They revisit old problems so often their memories become part of who they are in the present. They identify with painful events that color everything they do and think.
If you are hanging on to a problem, recognize the time has come to let it go.
When you forgive people who have caused pain in your life, you surrender negativity and regain your emotional freedom and get back to the business of living.
Wrap Up
The way you think about your life struggles largely impacts your mood. By shifting your perspective and changing your lens, greater happiness is possible.
Cognitive restructuring gives us a simple and successful way in which to change the way we view and think of the world around us. By taking an active and structured approach to positive change, we grow towards the person we want to become.
