What if I told you I had something that could change how you were thinking and reacting to things that was totally free, available any time, and useful in many difficult situations as a way of coping?  You’d probably want some, right?  Well, today I’d like to share with you a strategy for everyday living based on positive psychology research that helps to shift how we hold and process emotionally charged situations.  Cognitive Reappraisal is an intentional shift in perspective from what automatically comes to mind.  It involves changing how we think about a situation in order to change how we feel. Easy, right?  No, of course not, but with intention and focus, it can become a useful tool in the “coping with life” tool box that can reduce our overall level of distress and unburden us from unnecessary stress.

The success of cognitive appraisal reflects a basic fact of psychological life.  What and how we think about things can play a large role in shaping our emotional experience. For most people, especially people who tend to have some anxiety or depression or are prone to stress, our habitual way to interpret events is with a negative filter.  Evolution has actually trained our brain to do this in order to protect us from danger.  If we can see potential harm and anticipate it, we can do something to mitigate it. But this overestimation of negativity will lead us to feeling, well, negative.  Cognitive reappraisal is a fancy way of stepping back from this habitual response to looking at the situation from a differring perspective that can shift its meaning and reduce its emotionally upsetting impact.  For example, you just learn that your dear friend who lives close by is moving away.  Your reaction may be feeling sad, angry, and lonely.  You think about how you will miss her, remind yourself of how people tend to leave you, and imagine losing this important friendship.  Applying a reappraisal, you shift your perspective to thinking about how happy she is to get her new job, how she has been such a great friend to you and support for many years, and how you will be able to visit her in her new home or plan a vacation together to meet in the middle.  While not denying the sadness and disappointment of the situation, you balance the possible negative consequences with potential positive ones.

As a strategy useful for coping, cognitive reappraisal has a double barreled effect according to research.  It both lowers negative emotions such as sadness and anxiety and increases positive emotions associated with well being.  And because it actually alters activity patterns in emotional processing circuits in the brain, over time, it dampens excessive activation of brain centers such as the amygdala, which sends our emotional alarm signals in response to incoming information. Strong emotions limit our capacity for analyzing problems and generating possible solutions (fight/flight/freeze).  Cognitive reappraisal restores access to rational thinking and perspective taking. Researchers have shown that students with intense Math anxiety were able to improve their performance on Math tests with the use of reappraisal during the test.  Brain imaging showed that there was an increase in brain activities linked to arithmetic performance compared to those who didn’t use reappraisal.

Life doesn’t always go the way we want or expect it to.  Experts identify several questions you can ask yourself to stimulate a positive reappraisal for when things go awry.  Are you engaging in some sort of cognitive distortion, such as catastrophizing, looking at the situation in black and white terms, or personalizing a situation?  What evidence is there to support your negative appraisal – in other words, what is fact and what is fear?  Are there any positive outcomes possible for the situation?  Are you grateful for any aspect of the situation?  In what ways may you be better off from experiencing the situation?  What did you learn from it?

A simple little trick I use with myself and with people I work with is actually based on cognitive reappraisal.  Anxious people tend to get caught up in the “what ifs”.  What if I fail, what if I lose my job, what if my husband gets sick.  We anticipate all the negative possibilities.  So, I ask, what if I were to “what if” in the positive?  What if I win the lottery?  What if I meet a new friend?  What if I am the one chosen for the reward?  If we’re going to use our mind to anticipate, why not anticipate for good and not evil?

So, it turns out Monty Python was right – always look on  the bright side of life – at least more of the time.  It’s not about denying reality or truth, but actually seeing the whole truth.  There is usually good and bad in everything.  Reappraising and challenging your negative assumptions can bring about psychological resilience.  It offers a mental resource to distance from negative emotions by adding a perspective that not only dampens negativity, but enables people to think in ways that lead to adaptive responses.   Soooooooo….

… Some things in life are bad; They can really make you mad; Other things just make you swear and curse; When you’re chewing on life’s gristle; Don’t grumble, give a whistle; And this’ll help things turn out for the best; And;… Always look on the bright side of life; Always look on the light side of life; whistle whistle whistle