① ② ③ ④ ⑤
① Is my thinking based on facts?
② Is my thinking best helping me protect my life and health?
③ Is my thinking best helping me achieve my short and long-term goals?
④ Is my thinking best helping me prevent unwanted conflicts with others?
⑤ Is my thinking helping me feel the emotions I want to feel without using e.g. alcohol or drugs?
➡️ 3 honest “yes” to the above = rational and healthy thinking
➡️ 3 honest “no”to the above = irrational and unhealthy thinking
Bravo! You just discovered 5 principles of Rational Thinking!
🎶Rational thinking → 🎶healthy emotions → 🎶supportive actions
🎶Healthy? Rational? Can I do it?🎶
Rational thinking means healthy thinking. It doesn’t equal positive thinking though. It means thinking that serves you, that leads you to your goals, is supportive for you, thanks to which you feel the way you want to feel.
👽In the past I used to not fully understand the fact that emotions are only the third item on the list and that they don’t come out of anywhere. I thought I knew how to manage emotions, but it was more like: “calm down, it’s not worth getting nervous”; or: “If everything looks to be fine, then there is no reason to be sad.” I was a little better at arranging things to be in a good mood, I knew myself well enough to know what would please me and bring me joy.
On the other hand, in various situations at home or at work, which happened all the time, I felt incapable of feeling how I wanted to feel in that particular moment.
👽My understanding was that there were situations and as a consequence of these situations emotions were popping up. I was convinced that it was something or someone who could piss me off, cheer me up, make me happy, worry me, sadden me or frustrate me. At that time, I didn’t realize that it was my own thoughts on a given topic that led me to feel various emotions. Not always the kind of emotions I wanted to feel.
➡️Finally during my postgraduate studies in psycho-oncology, I was reminded of an approach coming from behavior – cognitive area: Rational Behavior Therapy. This approach was developed by Maxie Clarence Maultsby, Jr., MD (1932–2016). A world-renowned psychiatrist who gained recognition primarily as an early co-creator of the development of cognitive-behavioral therapies and RTB. It was so appealing to me that I decided to check this approach on myself. For me, discovering this method and using five principles of healthy thinking was like discovering a new continent.
❓And how about you? How many times have you been pissed off at something or someone and then thought about it unproductively over and over again? Or instead of explaining the situation right away, understanding it, you just carried it in yourself and then got angry at your partner, child or other loved one at the closest opportunity?
It’s not possible to explain everything to everyone every time. It would be either a fairy tale or a nightmare, depending on one’s point of view.
But what you can do is to learn how to put five principles of healthy thinking into practice. This skill can be super useful in many situations.
①②③④⑤
These 5 questions can be a checkpoint, a quick check of what is currently going on.
They will allow you to make decisions about how you want to feel and act in a given situation.
Mastering them will give you the ability to:
✔ check whether your thoughts (and beliefs) support you or rather block your willingness to do something
✔decide what and how you want to think
✔check whether what you think is fact-based
➡️When you start to work with these 5 questions and test them on in practice, it can be a bit stiff and artificial. But after a few exercises, you will start to be comfortable using them and the whole process gets automatic. The results can be small or big. With mastering the process you gain the ability to significantly understand your thinking and influence it. That’s why it’s called one of the self-help methods. You learn it, practice it and then start using it for your own benefit. This doesn’t mean that problems suddenly start to disappear or what’s worse / better some people disappear 😉 But thanks to the fact that you start to think in a more supportive and healthy way, you start to feel more independent and healthy.
❗️Some of the results are small, even minimal, but they are the ones that make a huge difference overall.
❗️But it may also happen that the results will lead to making big decisions that will make significant changes in your life.