Months back I promised that I would circle back and cover common cognitive distortions from time to time on The Anxious Morning. Today we’re going to look at one of my favorite cognitive distortions. Emotional reasoning.
Emotional reasoning is what we call it when you use your emotional state to judge or evaluate yourself or the world around you. Here’s a quick example for you.
“I feel lonely. I am worthless and nobody cares about me.”
In this example, loneliness is the emotion you are experiencing. You then use that emotion as the basis for forming judgements about yourself and the world at large. You see your emotional state as an accurate reflection of reality, as if emotions were facts about the universe rather than interpreted reactions to the universe.
See the problem here?
For anxious people dealing with issues like panic disorder or agoraphobia, cognitive distortions often focus on feelings of fear and a sense of being unsafe. One of the very first things I ever posted on Instagram was that you can be afraid and safe at the same time. This is often mind-blowing when anxious people see it because emotional reasoning leads them to conclude that feeling afraid must mean that they are not safe.
If you’ve ever responded to me with “ … but it FEELS …”, then you are engaging in emotional reasoning. It feels unsafe, therefore it must be. Sound familiar?
How often have you heard the phrase, “Emotions are not facts”? If you’re scrolling through social media platforms for help with your anxiety and mental health, the odds are high that you hear it all the time. Maybe once a week, or even more. There’s a reason for that! Emotional reasoning goes into high gear for people with anxiety (and also depression) but all humans engage in emotional reasoning sometimes. Nobody is immune to it. If you spent any more than about 7 minutes on Facebook during the Trump administration, you saw emotional reasoning in action all the time.
“I feel angry so the President is evil!”
“I feel powerful and protected so the President is awesome!”
Remember those debates. Emotional reasoning, ladies and gentlemen. And the funniest thing about those debates was always seeing people attempting to claim intellectual high ground because they were “not emotional about it”. Oh really? I could point out that feeling good about yourself about being non-emotional is in fact being emotional, but that’s a rant for a different day.
The point here is that if you are reading this, emotional reasoning is likely playing a pretty big role in creating and maintaining your anxious state. It is also likely to contribute to your resistance to change and unwillingness to do difficult things because it FEELS a certain way. If you are feeling called out here, don’t take it personally. We’ve all been there.
You know logically that you are OK and that anxiety has never hurt you. You can see that your anxious thoughts never come true. But emotional reasoning is a powerful thing and when left unchecked it will absolutely drive a steamroller over logic and reality. I’m guessing you can relate to what I’m saying here.
Just knowing about emotional reasoning and other cognitive distortions will not make you instantly better, but when we have an understanding of the mechanisms that drive this whole mess, we can better inform our recovery choices and our actions. Knowing isn’t everything, but it is something, so take a few minutes and see if you can identify times where you are engaging in emotional reasoning, especially when it comes to anxiety and recovery.
You can’t just stop doing that on demand, but you can start to recognize when it’s happening and take a few steps back to put a little space between that emotionally reasoned conclusion and the next action you take.
“Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.” - Jean Racine
Every Friday I’ll share one of my favorite quotes. They’ll often have direct application in recovery, but sometimes they’re just generally funny, inspiring, or thought-provoking. I hope you enjoy them.
174. Cognitive Distortions: Emotional Reasoning