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Cognitive Restructuring

Reducing stress by changing the way you think

Cognitive Restructuring is a useful tool for understanding what lies behind stressful and unhappy feelings and moods, and for reframing the unnecessary negative thinking that we can all engage in from time to time. Particularly when used with positive thinking, Cognitive Restructuring can help us turn these moods around, so that we can approach situations in a positive frame of mind.

This is obviously important, because not only are negative moods unpleasant, they can also reduce the quality of our performance, and undermine our relationships with other people.

The key idea behind Cognitive Restructuring is that our moods are driven by what we tell ourselves, based on our interpretation of things that are going on around us. Cognitive Restructuring is a useful way of evaluating how rational and valid these interpretations are. Where we find that we're being unnecessarily negative in the way that we're looking at things, then this naturally changes the way we think about situations, thereby changing our moods.

Cognitive Restructuring is similar to the Positive Rational Thinking tool, which is useful for dealing with spontaneous or simple negative thinking. By contrast, Cognitive Restructuring is particularly helpful where issues are more difficult, and where they warrant more careful, considered examination.

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