depression and anxiety can come with strong emotions like sadness despair hopelessness and
fear sometimes people can view the mere presence of these strong emotions as evidence to support
the emotions themselves it's something we call emotional reasoning and in this video
i'm going to be talking about what emotional reasoning is and what you can do about it
hi everyone in today's video we're going to be continuing our series on cognitive biases and
today's topic is going to be emotional reasoning which is a very common type of cognitive
distortion that people will experience that tends to exacerbate anxiety and depression but before i
get into that just a couple of disclaimers to go over i'm a registered psychologist in the province
of british columbia canada and this video is for informational purposes only it is not intended as
a substitute or replacement for advice from your doctor or mental health professional
so with those things out of the way let's start talking about emotional
reasoning which is uh when a person uses the presence or the intensity of their emotions
as evidence that the emotions are based in reality or that there's some reality to the emotions so
people often perceive that they have intuition and that their emotions are telling them something and
that they should listen to those emotions and uh you know generally speaking that's okay but when
you're talking about anxiety and depression this tendency can lead to a lot of problems
so things like i feel so frightened it must mean there's something really dangerous here
or i feel inadequate so i must be worthless i feel guilty so i must have done something wrong
the problem is our emotions are based on interpretations of events
not events themselves and so if our interpretation is wrong i'll experience an emotion that doesn't
really match the situation an emotion that is inappropriate or inconsistent with what's actually
going on so i can end up being extremely anxious in a situation that's perfectly safe
so imagine myself in a movie theater and i'm watching a horror movie
and a really intense scene in the movie a guy jumps out of a shower with a big knife and
i react my heart's racing my hands are sweaty i feel terrified so i feel extremely anxious
but i'm in a big comfy chair in a big theater with lots of people i've got popcorn in my lap
there's nothing to be afraid of there's no danger so the emotion is inconsistent with what's
actually happening in the situation some other examples is uh i can feel completely hopeless at
times when there's much to feel hopeful about i i can be extremely angry at somebody even though
they haven't done anything wrong we tend to see this a lot in marriages jealousy
provides a really good example for how emotional reasoning works now most of us at some point have
known someone you know maybe even ourselves who's been extremely jealous or suspicious
that maybe their partner was cheating on them and this is they have this feeling despite a
lot of evidence to the contrary but in a situation like that because i feel the jealousy so intensely
i can interpret that something has to be going on something has to be taking place or i wouldn't be
feeling this way so then what happens is i start to behave in a jealous way towards my partner
maybe i start to check her phone to see messages or i ask her where she's going or
check in on her in the middle of the day and what this can end up doing is
pushing my partner away they may become more withdrawn or disconnected because
the jealousy is a big turn off and it's pushing them away but as they withdraw and become more
disconnected it makes me feel that something's wrong and that just reinforces my jealousy
and so what ends up happening is the jealousy becomes this self-perpetuating cycle and it's
all based on this sense that i feel jealous so there must be a reason for me to feel that way
similar things can happen in anxiety if i have ongoing worries about things that might happen
i might start to behave in ways to prevent those bad things from happening
which in turn just reinforces the perception that bad things are going to happen to me
it can also happen in depression where i can have ongoing feelings of hopelessness and
if i feel hopeless i can feel like a failure before i even started working on a goal
and so if i'm going to fail at the goal maybe i procrastinate or maybe i don't even work towards
the goal because what's the point i'm probably going to fail and this can lead to even greater
hopelessness because i feel that change isn't even possible even if i were to try
so the interesting thing about emotional reasoning is that people who tend to use
emotional reasoning only tend to do it with unpleasant emotions with negative emotions so
i rarely ever see people that assume that when they feel happy everything must be fine
right they don't necessarily feel that way it's just well i feel happy i feel happy
it doesn't necessarily mean that everything's fine everything's going to continue to be fine
so emotional reason can be this really kind of challenging pitfall that people can get
into if they engage in emotional reasoning a lot so the question becomes how do you manage
emotional reasoning so the first thing is to recognize that you're actually doing it that
you're actually engaging in emotional reasoning uh label it and recognize it for what it is i'm
using my emotions as evidence of this feared outcome and once you've identified that you're
engaging in emotional reasoning remind yourself that emotions lie just because you feel it
doesn't mean that it's real so don't believe everything that you feel
look for evidence that might support your emotions i'm not saying you know kind of cover your cover
your ears close your eyes and just imagine everything's going to turn out well but the idea
is yeah okay look for evidence that may support your anxiety feelings or your depression feelings
but equally as important look for the evidence that doesn't support how you feel and in this
way what you're doing is you're allowing your emotions to be based on what's actually
happening rather than your emotions to be based on the fact that you're having those emotions
so i hope that makes sense i hope that gives you a better sense of
emotional reasoning and how emotional reasoning can get a person into trouble with anxiety
and depression i'd love to hear your thoughts or ideas or questions about this so please leave me
some comments in the comments section down below if you've been enjoying my videos and
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thank you for making it all the way to the end of this video and i will see you in the next one