Cognitive Reappraisal
What is Cognitive Reappraisal?
Cognitive reappraisal involves changing how a person thinks about, or appraises, a situation. This can be particularly helpful when dealing with a stressful or distressing situation, as cognitive reappraisal helps you practice pausing, mentally taking a step back, and thinking about a situation with a broader or different perspective, which can decrease the emotional impact of a situation.
Research has found that adults have a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information more than positive information. This negativity bias, along with anxiety, can lead us to automatically view situations as more negative or threatening than they objectively are. In other words, our initial appraisal of a situation may not be accurate or helpful, and cognitive reappraisal helps us view what is happening around us in more neutral and often more helpful ways.
The 3 Steps of Cognitive Reappraisal
Cognitive appraisal: Your initial interpretation of a situation and its potential threat.
Cognitive reappraisal: Intentionally reappraising a situation to be more neutral
Emotional regulation: The new interpretation leads to a situation having a lower emotional impact
This Psychology Today article provides an overview of cognitive reappraisal.
Why Cognitive Reappraisal is Helpful
Our thoughts influence our emotions and behaviors. Inaccurate and unhelpful thoughts can increase stress, anxiety, and depression, for example, and lead us to engage in unhelpful behaviors that ultimately go against our goals and values. For example, if you receive feedback at work to add data to an upcoming presentation and tell yourself, “I am incompetent, and my supervisor thinks I’m an idiot,” you feel more anxiety, which leads you to avoid working on the presentation, which in turns creates more anxiety and thoughts of incompetence.
It's easy to get caught in a cycle of unhelpful thoughts, emotions, and unhelpful behaviors, and cognitive reappraisal is a tool for breaking this cycle and cultivating more neutral thoughts and in turn less emotional intensity and more helpful behaviors. Also, cognitive reappraisal helps less rumination, or thinking about an event over and over again.
Examples of Cognitive Reappraisal
Imagine you want to make a job change and find a job posting about a job you feel excited about and are well qualified for. You spend time carefully crafting a cover letter and updating your resume. You then apply for the job with the thought that you will definitely get an interview. A couple of weeks later, you receive an email thanking you for your application, and letting you know that the recruitment team has decided to move forward with other applicants. You feel surprised and disappointed and automatically tell yourself that you are not a skilled professional and you will not find a job you like, leading you to feel depressed.
However, you then pause and engage in cognitive reappraisal, reminding yourself that you can be a qualified applicant and not move forward in an interview process, and there are likely a lot of applicants. You recognize that you have an opportunity to keep looking for jobs that are a good fit and that while you want to make a job change, you are not in an urgent rush. This reappraisal helps you feel less depressed and more motivated to continue to apply for jobs that sound interesting.
Or, imagine you pass a colleague in the hallway and say hello, and they ignore you and quickly way by. You may initially think, “That person doesn’t like me. What is wrong with me,” which leads you to feel anxious and self-conscious. Then, you pause and reappraise the situation by reminding yourself, “I don’t know what they are thinking. Maybe they are having a stressful day and their reaction has nothing to do with me,” which leads you to feel calmer.
How to Practice Cognitive Reappraisal
So, cognitive reappraisal is a helpful tool for managing emotional intensity and lessening the negative impact of events on your sense of well-being. Nonetheless, cognitive reappraisal takes intentional practice as it is easy to default to negativity bias. Also, it is important to reappraise a situation in a way that honors your experience and does not pretend that a situation is completely positive if it is not. The aim is to foster a balanced and neutral perspective that acknowledges the complexity of experience and recognizes that situations are rarely all bad or all good.
If it is difficult to reappraise a situation, imagine how someone else may think about it. Bring to mind a person you respect and trust, and ask yourself, “How would _____ think about this?” You may also want to consider any helpful features or lessons learned from a situation.
To learn more about helpful cognitive reappraisal tools, please contact us at CBT Denver.