About book Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy (1999)
It is an interesting statement on contemporary culture that practical, self-help books are often looked down on as lowbrow, unsophisticated, and unworthy of serious consideration. Just note how often in reviews of self-help books you come across the phrase, “I don’t normally read books like this,” or the like. Of course, skepticism regarding books of this kind is merited, especially when you take into account the amount of quackery, chicanery, demagoguery, and baloney in print. Indeed, I think it’s fair to say we have a veritable “advice industry” in our culture today, with a great deal of money to be made and thus lots of enterprising, unscrupulous people peddling various forms of nonsense, hoping to get rich. Self-help books now sell so well that they have to be excluded from non-fiction sales rankings, because if they weren’t, the top 10 best sellers would be an endless parade of one self-help book after another. But why are so many people willing to pay for and devour book after book, getting swept about by the ceaseless winds of doctrine, navigating their lives through fad after fad? Of course, fashionable ways of running (and ruining) your life have always been with us; yet I think there is another aggravating factor at work in the present day. I had this realization while reading two history books by Will Durant, one about Ancient Greece and the other about Rome. As Durant discussed the philosophies of education in this societies, I noticed how central were the ideas of ethical and moral education. I don’t mean “ethical” in the narrow sense of right and wrong, but in the wider, Greek sense, used by Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Epicureans—how to cultivate wisdom, how to live a well-regulated life, how to deal with the hardships and misfortunes that are so often thrown our way. These were primary concerns of pedagogy. By contrast, our current education system, as least here in the States, has deemphasized ethical teaching almost completely.There are, of course, many reasons for this, and many of them are good ones; but I do think it leaves a certain gap in our culture that self-help books partially fill. Unfortunately, from what I can tell, many of these seem rather mediocre—or worse. But this book, by David D. Burns, is for me one of the exceptions. It is an interesting and, in my experience, extremely useful book, based on a well-studied and much-tested therapeutic technique.Burns’s aim in writing this book was to popularize the methods of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), a therapeutic technique developed by the psychologist Aaron T. Beck, among others. The premise of CBT is very simple: your moods are caused by your thoughts, so by controlling your thoughts you can control your moods. At first sight, this may seem like complete nonsense; after all, our moods come and go, and our thoughts simply take on the timbre of whatever mood we happened to be in, right? This seems to be most people’s assumption; it was certainly mine. Yet consider this scenario, which actually happened to me: My boss scheduled a meeting with me out of the blue. I immediately started thinking that I hadn’t been doing a good job recently, so I began to panic, sure I was about to get fired. Eventually, this panic turned to indignation, as I convinced myself of the injustice of the situation, since I worked hard and tried my best. So, literally trembling with anxiety and outrage, I went to the meeting and sat down; and my boss said: “We’re giving you a bonus, because you’ve been doing so well. Congratulations!” Suddenly, all my negative feelings turned into joy.This I think well illustrates the central idea behind CPT. All of my negative and positive emotions in this scenario were due to my interpretation of the event, not the event itself. I made the false assumption, based on no evidence, that I was going to be fired. I thought of every mistake and imperfection in my work over the last month or so, and convinced myself that I was doing poorly and that termination was immanent. Then, I persuaded myself that I wasn’t given adequate resources or support, and that the situation was unjust. And when I was finally given the bonus, I interpreted that to mean I was doing a good job and that I was getting all the support I needed—which were equally tenuous interpretations. Thus you can see how my mood was a direct product of my thoughts.All of my negative assumption in the above paragraph contain what Burns calls “warped thoughts,” or cognitive distortions. These are irrational patterns of thinking which have been found to be common in depressed and overly anxious patients. Essentially, the CBT interpretation of depression is that it results from persistent, unrealistic negative interpretations of one’s life and experience, leading one to focus solely on the bad and to feel hopeless about the future. Burns gives a list of 10 types of warped thoughts, but in my opinion there is quite a bit of overlap in the categories. The distortions more or less boil down to the following: making negative assumptions, whether about the future or about what someone else is thinking; assuming that one’s emotions accurately reflect reality; over-generalizing a small number of negative occurrences into an inevitable trend; willfully ignoring all of the positives in a situation to focus solely on the negative; thinking in black and white categories; making unjustified “should” or “ought” statements about the world without considering other people's perspectives; feeling that you are responsible for things over which you have no control; and labeling oneself and others with vague pejoratives.The first part of this book is dedicated to allowing the reader to recognize these types of thoughts and to combat them. This most often is just a matter of writing these thoughts down and exposing the distortions that lay beneath. Simple as this sounds, I’ve found this to be remarkably effective. As you might have guessed from the above example, I am rather prone to anxiety; and during this summer, my anxiety was getting to the point that I felt incapacitated. I was driving my friends and family nuts with my constant worrying; and nobody, including myself, knew how to deal with me. Luckily, I heard about a site called MoodGYM, which is a website developed by the Australian National University for people dealing with anxiety and depression, using the techniques of CBT. Desperate for some relief, I completed the reading and activities on the website, and found that I felt much, much better. Impressed, I looked for books on CBT techniques, and of course came across this one.What most intrigued me about CBT was the emphasis on accuracy. The techniques weren’t based on the premise that I was somehow damaged or filled with strange desires, nor did they include any amount of self-delusion or wishful thinking. Quite the reverse: the whole emphasis was on thinking clearly, basing beliefs on evidence, avoiding unreasonable assumptions, and seeing things from multiple points of view. Take anger. Very often (though not always), our feelings of indignation simply result from seeing an event through a narrowly selfish lens. We don’t get the job we interviewed for, and we feel cheated; someone beat us to that parking spot, and we feel outraged. But when we consider these scenarios from the perspective of the boss or the other driver, the situation suddenly seems much more just and fair; they are pursuing their own interests, just like we are. So simply by looking at the situation from multiple points of view, and thus understanding it more fully, our feelings of anger are cooled.For my part, when I began working through the techniques in the book, I was astounded by how often these types of distortions plagued my thinking. It would almost be funny if it wasn’t so unpleasant: I could twist any situation or piece of information into somehow reflecting negatively on my character; everything bad in the world confirmed my negativity, and everything good only served to reproach me and to make me envious and resentful. The good news was that, when I began to recognize these illogical patterns of thought, it was extremely easy for me to correct them; and for the past month or so I’ve been feeling a great deal happier and calmer.After teaching the reader several personal and interpersonal techniques—strategies for dealing with oneself and others more effectively—Burns moves on to examining some of the underlying assumptions that give rise to warped thinking. It turns out that these all involve equating one’s “value” or “worth” with some extrinsic good, whether it be approval, love, success, fame, or even skill. There is, of course, nothing wrong with enjoying the approval of others, the thrill of love, the sense of accomplishment, or the satisfaction of a job well done. The problem arises when, instead of enjoying something, we use it to measure ourselves.To use a somewhat silly but germane example, how many people believe that those who read more books, bigger books, harder books, are somehow “superior” to people who don’t? I’ve certainly been guilty of this; but it is pretty clearly an absurd position when I think about it, and one that I couldn’t possibly defend on any valid moral or intellectual grounds. What on earth does it even mean to be a “superior” person? Superiority only makes sense when we have some quality we can measure, such as wealth or strength; but when we say “superior” by itself, what quality do we mean? “Worth”? How do you measure that? You can try being clever and say “By the number of books you read” or something, but that’s clearly circular reasoning. If you are a humanist or religious, you might say that you have worth just from the fact of being alive; but then of course everyone is equally worthy and there’s no sense in feeling worthless.Of course, in the non-Goodreads population, book addiction isn’t a big problem; more often, people feel down because they imagine that approval, love, money, or expertise is necessary to be a worthwhile and happy person. But the absurdity of this kind of thinking is revealed when you consider how many famous, beloved, rich, virtuosic, brilliant, successful people there have been, and still are, who are deeply depressed and feel worthless and hopeless. Short of torture, there are no circumstances in life that guarantee unhappiness; and the same goes for happiness. This is not to say that you shouldn’t try to change or improve your situation, only to remind you that the way you interpret a situation is often as important as the situation itself, if not more so. I cannot hope to sum up the entire book in the space of this review; but I hope what I have included has convinced you that it’s at least worth looking into. After all, by definition, nothing feels better than happiness. Of course, the book isn’t perfect. For one, Burns’s writing style is nothing remarkable, and it is occasionally tacky; but I think that it’s excusable considering that he’s a therapist, not a writer, and that he’s trying to reach a popular audience. One flaw that I thought was less easy to excuse was Burns's exclusive focus on straight couples in his sections on love and relationships. Burns writes in a purely heteronormative vein, not even acknowledging same-sex couples, which is difficult to justify, considering the higher rates of depression and anxiety among gays and lesbians—not to mention others in the LGBTQ community. I hope this is changed in future additions.A criticism I am tempted to make, but which I actually think is unfair, is that CBT makes people passive, accepting, and more content with the status quo. It sometimes seems as if Burns is telling people not to try to change their circumstances or the world at large, but rather to accommodate themselves to it. I think this is unfair for a few reasons. For one, no matter how powerful we may be, there will always be things in life which we cannot change and which we simply have to accept; so developing the tools to do so without frustration or anger is useful for everyone. What’s more, real depression and anxiety are not conducive to effective action. Quite the opposite: depression often makes people apathetic and anxiety makes people feel too overwhelmed to do anything. What’s more, you can’t solve a problem unless you can see it clearly, and the thinking patterns associated with depression and anxiety lead to a total inability to see problems clearly and to deal with them rationally. So I think accusations that this book is somehow reactionary or that it leads to passivity are unfair.To sum up this already overlong review, I just hope I’ve convinced you that this book might be extremely valuable to you or to someone you know. It certainly has been for me. Now I no longer feel that I am at the mercy of my moods or emotions, or that my sense of self-worth or confidence is dependent on my circumstances. And I’d say these benefits definitely outweigh the tacky cover and the corny title, don’t you?(Oh, and if the book seems like too big a commitment, MoodGYM is pretty swell too, despite additional corniness of course.)
David Burns' Feeling Good is about the science of cognitive therapy. The theory states that your emotions are caused by your thoughts, and most negative emotions are caused by distortions in your thoughts, a series of illogical thoughts. They are:(1) All-or-nothing thinking: Everything is perfect or everything is imperfect; everything is good or everything is evil; everything is correct or everything is incorrect; etc.(2) Overgeneralization: One instance of something is used to explain all other instances.(3) Mental filter: A matter of focusing on negative situations.(4) Disqualifying the positive: Explaining away otherwise positive things as not so positive or maybe outright negaive.(5) Jumping to conclusions, which comes in two flavors: (A) Mind reading, when you assume what others believe or how you think situations really are; or (B) Fortune telling, when you assume that the future will always be bad.(6) Magnification of minimization: Making small things seem very seriously negative or big positive things trivial.(7) Emotional reasoning: Assuming that because you feel a certain way that you are a certain way, for example feeling helpless and so believing you're helpless.(8) Should statements: Expecting the world to conform to your criteria of what people should and shouldn't do and the way events should and shouldn't be, even though the world is not like that at all.(9) Labeling and mislabeling: Incorrectly type-casting someone or something, assume someone is an idiot, for example, because they make a mistake.(10) Personalization: Assuming responsibility for things and actions of other people that are clearly (if you think about it) out of control.Those are the Big Ten, and obviously there is a lot of conceptual overlap. They amount to what are called logical fallacies in critical thinking or informal logic, but which here are being used to identify problems in thinking.The remedy, Burns writes, is to write down your cognitive distortions when you have them, label them in one of the above categories, and provide a written reason for why the particular thought you have is wrong. For example, maybe you have this negative thought: "Everybody at my job hates me." Minimally, this is an example of mind reading, a form of jumping to conclusions but it could be and is likely connected to other cognitive distortions when you think about why you think this. Maybe you believe this because you think "Nobody talks to me at work in the morning, and they should talk to me." And so you see that because you think they should do this, an example of a should statement, you think that they don't like you. You should then reason, and write the reason, that just because people don't talk to you in the morning doesn't mean they hate you, and furthermore you don't have any other good reason for assuming that they hate you.The above is just an example but this is how Burns recommended you do cognitive therapy on yourself. Of course, if you actually consult a cognitive therapist, he would give you exercises to this effect. It is not a cure-all, but it is on the right tracks to changing your thinking. I cannot stress enough Burns' insistence that you write down your cognitive distortions and correct them. Like exercise, when you do this, you are actively changing your thought patterns.The only reason I don't give this a full five stars is because the book could have been shorter. And I think most of his anecdotes about patients are malarkey, made up to continue the flow of the narrative. But they serve as little parables for what he is trying to preach and what he encourages everyone to practice. Also, I confess to skimming the material about psychopharmacology because it was just plain boring and likely largely outdated. Plus I didn't read the last chapter. Anyway, I really liked this book, and I think it could be helpful, to me or anyone.(Note: By the way, this is the first book I read on iBooks and on an iPhone 4. This book is available in digital format and very very very cheap.)
Do You like book Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy (1999)?
I'd love to help in loaning it to you, but seeing as you're in the Philippines and I'm in the states, I don't see how that's going to be possible. It'd cost more to ship it than the book's actually worth.
—Jamie
I use David Burn's techniques from this book sometimes weekly, sometimes daily. I was familiarized with this book about 10 years ago and I still flip to page 40 to sort out "cognitive distortions." He has ways to pinpoint the thought processes that lead to sadness, anger, frustration, low self-image-- it is a logical and empowering tool to know how to quickly put out mental flares. Just a few of these "cognitive distortions" include: All-or-nothing thinking ("you always forget my birthday"), Mind-reading/the fortune teller error, Mental Filter (focusing on one negative event till everything seems to be negative), and emotional reasoning ("I feel_____ therefore it must be true.")After narrowing down your thought, finding which distortion it fits under, and then writing out a "rational response," it DOES make you feel good!! Instantly!Great tool to have. I am working on ways to simplify the methods to use for my children.
—Elaine
Many years ago I had a confluence of tragic events in my life and I decided to see a psychologist for a while. One day the psychologist told me that I needed to "deal with my feelings". I told him in frustration that I heard that many times before, but that I did not understand what that meant. I asked him what exactly do people do when they "deal with their feelings". He was silent for a few moments and then he wrote the name of this book down on a slip of paper. This book will tell you how to "deal with your feelings".You may get an instant change in your feelings on some small issues, but for the most part cognitive therapy is like jogging to lose weight. You have to do it consistently and for a while to get significant results. No magic, you have to work, but you will get good results.One of the symptoms of depression is not seeing things as they are. Since cognitive therapy works on learning to see things as how they are a person with severe depression might benefit from seeing a psychologist who specializes in cognitive therapy. Such a therapist can help a person see around their blind spots whereas a book can not.
—Steve
