Amber Hollingsworth explains a CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) technique for controlling emotions by managing thoughts, focusing on the distortion of overgeneralizing. She defines overgeneralization (making blanket statements from single incidents), gives everyday examples (e.g., "men are scum" after being cheated on; declaring a whole day ruined after a bad morning), and offers a practical tactic: contain negative events and 'start your day over' rather than letting one incident define everything.
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Today's tip kind of connects to what we learned yesterday in our video. It's also another way of controlling and shaping your thinking, which will in fact, control and shape the way you feel. Did you know that you can control the way that you feel? Your feelings are directly related to the cues that your body sends and your thinking brain sends. So your brain gets those cues from your body, body, and your thinking, and that will turn into an emotion. So you can control the way you feel by controlling the way you think. Let me give you an example from something that we call cognitive behavioral therapy. Sounds fancy, right? It's really not. It just means control the way you feel by controlling the way you think. In cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT as they call it, there's a concept known as over generalizing. So that's when you take one little incident and you use that as a blanket statement or thought to apply to a much broader context that it probably doesn't apply to. Like, for example, if I had a boyfriend in my past who cheated on me, and now I walk around the world and I think men are scum. They're just all lying, cheating, dirty dogs or whatever that is, that might be an over generalization. And here's a really good, useful, everyday tactic to avoid over generalization. A friend of mine who's got some long term recovery used to say, you can start your day over at any moment. So, like, you know what, it feels like you've, like, woke up on the wrong side of the bed and everything's going wrong, and you spilled coffee on your shirt and the hot water was all gone and you run late and. And you think to yourself, oh, this day is gonna suck. You know, I'm having a bad day already. Well, instead of saying to yourself, I'm having a bad day already or my day's gonna suck, you want to contain that. Honestly, you want to be honest about it, which is, you had a rough morning, but that doesn't mean you have to have a rough day so you can think. When you get to work, you can think, whoo, that was a rough morning. I'm glad I'm at work now so we can start over. Don't waste a whole day by thinking that you're having a terrible day because one or two difficult things happen that day. That's an example of how we often overgeneralize and we ruin and lose an entire day over it. Or if you get into an argument with your family because they don't trust you on something, don't say to yourself, you never trust me, you're never gonna get off my case, because that's not true. Anytime you feel like you're saying never or always, you're probably over generalizing. Because there's not many things that are never or always. So that's a good clue to listen out for. Be realistic. I'm not telling you to be sunshine and rainbows and deny that negative things are going on. I'm just telling you to be realistic about them and contain them for what they are and not make one little incident ruin everything. Everything.
