Stresstab7: Sound Thinking

The thoughts we give ourselves generally determine what feelings we will possess. People and circumstances do not make us feel angry or upset. Instead, we choose to get upset by what we tell ourselves about those people and circumstances. For example, it is not a messy roommate who makes us angry; instead, we feel angry by choosing to tell ourselves statements about the roommate such as, "She is lazy. She does it just to get me mad. I can't stand living with her one more day." These statements get us upset and cause stress. We always have a choice of telling ourselves other things about our roommate, which are, not stress promoting like, "She and I are different. Perhaps my example will rub off on her. I really like the way she looks today." Angry feelings will be replaced with calm feelings when we use such statements. Remember, the thoughts we give ourselves about the event cause the stress--not the event itself. As soon as we accept this principle, we have taken a major step in controlling the stress in our lives.

Another principle of sound thinking is to avoid making assumptions about the intent of another person's comments or behavior. If we hear or see something which concerns us, we need to inquire about its meaning so as to avoid misconstruing it. Most of us have a tendency to take things personally, think the worst about a situation and then act on our unsubstantiated assumptions. We should avoid this trap by limiting our fantasy thinking and finding out what the statement or behavior means before acting in a way we later regret.

Sound thinking involves accepting our past decisions without feeling bad about them. It is always easy to look back and see what we might have done without realizing we probably did the best we could at that time. Brooding over past decisions wastes time, gets us upset, does not help us make the best of the present, and does not help us plan for the future.

When we choose to think of the past or future, it is more beneficial to learn from past and plan for the future as opposed to our old habits of feeling guilty about the past and worrying about the future. We should learn to reflect on past mistakes in terms of "next time" instead of "if only." We accomplish nothing when we worry. In fact, we usually make things worse by upsetting ourselves. Sometimes we erroneously think that our worrying indicates, "we care." Genuine caring, however, involves doing what we can about the situation rather than worrying about it. Worrying just cheats us out of the time we could use for preparation.

Feeling guilty about something can be beneficial if it motivates us to change ourselves or the situation for the better. Feeling guilty without constructive change only promotes an irrational and negative view of ourselves. Some of us like to hang on to our guilt feeling so we can punish ourselves whenever things go wrong. This can be a cop-out from really facing a situation directly and taking action to make it better. We should honestly ask whether our guilt feelings are leading us to beneficial action whereby we can eliminate such feelings or whether we are holding on to them to make ourselves feel miserable.

Sound thinking is sometimes avoided when we choose to keep things "complex" with reference to ourselves and the stresses we feel. We choose to think in fuzzy terms when we use phrases like, "I don't know why I feel this way" or "I'm not sure what I want in a marriage partner." We frequently use such terms to obtain attention and concern from others or to avoid having to maturely deal with the problem at hand. For example, just feeling "yucky" can be used as a reason to avoid personal and social responsibilities. Stress can be dealt with more effectively if we force ourselves to be specific in identifying our feelings and the thoughts causing them.