What is Cognitive Reappraisal
Everyone experiences anxiety and sadness now and then. As long as you have a brain and a spinal cord, you’re prone to experiencing unpleasant feelings, and for good reason. Negative emotions signal that something is important or that something needs to change. Sometimes, however, emotions become so intense they overwhelm us and don’t serve any useful function. Sadness leads to depression. Anxiety becomes panic. Anger turns into aggression. In cognitive behavioral therapy, there are numerous psychological skills to modulate overwhelming emotions. Cognitive reappraisal is one such technique.
When you’re in the middle of one of these intense emotional states, you may have noticed that your thinking becomes markedly one-note, not so flexible. Intense sadness tunes out all thoughts that aren't intensely sad. The same goes for other feelings. When we're irritated, we have angry thoughts, and when frightened, frightening thoughts, etc. This kind of tunnel vision ends up stoking the fire of our emotions even more. You may have found yourself in a cycle where thoughts stirred emotions, which influenced your thoughts, which stirred the emotions, and on and on. This negative feedback loop is partly responsible for chronic emotional disorders and, in less severe cases, can really ruin your day. At times like these, it becomes important to have a way of short-circuiting this feedback loop.
The strategy known as cognitive reappraisal, also known as cognitive reframing or cognitive restructuring, is one powerful strategy for nudging your emotions back toward baseline (Barlow et al., 2011). Cognitive reappraisal involves recognizing the negative pattern your thoughts have fallen into and changing that pattern into one that's more effective. Shaping the course of how you make sense of things can change the course of your emotions, turning the dial down a couple of notches. Feeling more even-keel, it becomes easier to skillfully address whatever triggered the negative feelings.
Cognitive Reappraisal Definition: Cognitive reappraisal, a potent emotional regulation technique, involves identifying and transforming negative thought patterns into more effective ones. By altering how you perceive situations, you can dial down negative emotions, making it easier to address triggers with skill and maintain emotional balance.
Benefits of Cognitive Reappraisal in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Enhanced Emotion Regulation
There are numerous benefits of regularly applying cognitive reappraisal to challenging situations. Reappraising cognitions can improve emotional regulation by ensuring reactions to events aren't distorted or extreme. Emotion regulation is the process of managing our feelings and reactions to cope with different situations effectively. By having a better way of making sense of things, we are better able to manage our feelings to ensure they don't overwhelm us.
Improved Problem-Solving
Reappraising thoughts can also enhance the effectiveness of your problem-solving when challenges arise. When we're faced with difficult situations, we often experience stronger emotions that can distort our thinking. Cognitive reappraisal is a set of skills we can rely on time and again to find the most reasonable interpretation of the event and act accordingly. By maintaining a cool head and accurately assessing the circumstances, we are better positioned to confidently and adaptively solve the problems that come our way and achieve a constructive outcome.
Increase Resilience
Cognitive reappraisal can be a helping coping strategy for improving our ability to recover from a setback. Changing how we perceive problems to see them in a more grounded or realistic way can improve our ability to bounce back and find the motivation to persist. This happens because the setback was not as emotionally overwhelming as it might otherwise have been and because we can reframe things to improve our confidence, encouraged that we have a greater chance of being successful the next time.
Better Relationships
Cognitive reappraisal can improve the quality of our relationships by helping us to better manage conflicts and avoid misunderstandings. Instead of reacting to another's actions with anger or frustration, we're able to choose to see things from their perspective and find a more skillful way to engage. In this way, reappraisal can lead to stronger relationships by improving communication and reducing the potential for anger and resentment.
Improved Physical Health
Believe it or not, cognitive reappraisal can also profoundly influence our physical health by managing the impact of stress on our bodies. Changing how we make sense of problems can lower our levels of stress hormones, such as cortisol, which can lead to better health and well-being in the short and long term. Specifically, regularly managing chronic stress with cognitive reappraisal can result in improved sleep, immune system functioning, cognitive performance, and cardiovascular health. Additionally, cognitive reappraisal is often used to improve our ability to make healthier choices, such as starting an exercise program or cutting out red meat.
How to Engage in Cognitive Reappraisal
There are numerous ways to implement cognitive reappraisal, but the most common are listed below.
Assess your automatic appraisals: Pick a challenging situation and identify the thoughts that made it seem difficult.
Identify maladaptive cognitive distortions or thinking traps. Look for common cognitive distortions such as fortune-telling, all-or-nothing thinking, or catastrophizing.
Investigate your automatic appraisal from different perspectives. List the evidence for and against these appraisals. Do they prove your automatic appraisal? Find alternative explanations. Consider whether other people would interpret this case differently and why.
Develop a reapprisal. Find a new adaptive way of thinking about the situation that is grounded in facts and helps you feel empowered to face the challenge more confidently.
Check out our free online workbook to learn more about how to perform cognitive appraisal and to download free worksheets you can use to help you: A Course in CBT Techniques.
An Example of Cognitive Appraisal
Imagine you take a wrong turn on the way to a party and end up getting lost, making you considerably late. Your first response may be to get frustrated, appraising things by thinking, “This road construction is terrible! The city needs to get it together to find a different way of detouring traffic.” Your appraisal may make you exasperated. If you're prone to anger, your anger may run away with you, causing you to be fuming and ruining your time at the party once you arrive.
Instead of playing out this unpleasant, seemingly automatic cycle, take a moment to consider another perspective (reappraisal) you might have in this situation. The mere act of considering other interpretations can help you loosen your grip on your more angry perspective. Other ways of looking at this situation might even cause you to experience other feelings. Consider the following reappraisals:
· I always get lost. Why can’t I seem to do anything right?
· Oh no! If I’m late to the party, everyone will be mad at me, and no one will talk to me.
· I have the birthday cake in the trunk. Now, everyone at the party will have to wait for me before they can get started, and that’s miserable.
These different ways of thinking about the situation will elicit different emotional responses, although they’re not really an improvement on the first response. What’s interesting about them is that all of them contain at least a kernel of truth. None of them is out-and-out irrational. Some of them may be a bit extreme but not irrational. This is significant because it illustrates there usually isn’t just one way of making sense of a situation. All have validity. This means it’s possible to take an alternative perspective that is more effective in helping us feel more balanced.
Now consider the following reappraisals:
· Thank goodness, I will spare myself 30 minutes of talking to Elizabeth. I dodged a bullet there!
· I’m late again. I might as well enjoy the scenery while I’m driving around.
· People probably won’t care that much that I’m late.
· I’m usually on time. What a fluke!
· Life happens.
These beliefs also contain a kernel of truth. They're not merely the “power of positive thinking” but are reality-based ways of re-appraising the situation. Moreover, they'd probably be more effective in helping us keep our heads while we try to find our way to the party. While running over these new thoughts, you might still hear the old appraisal in your head: “This road construction is terrible! The city needs to get it together to find a different way of detouring traffic.” But now you can add some nuance to it, adding different viewpoints and thinking in a way that keeps a lid on your level of distress. The point is to allow other ways of making sense of a situation to coexist with the more emotionally triggering appraisal.
When to Seek Help
Cognitive Reappraisal is designed to be a tool for helping yourself be your own teacher for overcoming negative thought spirals. However, it's often helpful to seek out an expert cognitive behavioral therapist to get help when thinking patterns result in significant quality of life problems. If you or someone you know is experiencing anxiety and depression, or suffering from some other emotional problem, it's best to seek out a trained mental health professional to help you better learn these skills to recover more quickly and fully.
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Barlow, D.W. et al. (2011). Unified Protocol for Transdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders: Therapist Guide. London: Oxford University Press.