Calm Conflict, Save Your Breath, Don't Stress, It's All Small Stuff

Just came across a post at Diary of a Pointy Hat in which an Australian editor/blogger gives a 7 point plan for easing your life a little by minimizing conflict and getting on with living. Click on the above link for an explanation of each of the seven points.

The Points:
1. How much of this situation is my fault?
2. People are NOT psychic
3. People are NOT bad American movies
4. Write out the argument
5. What can I give up to make this better?
6. Don't try to 'win'
7. You can't work with crazy people

Miss D's seven points remind me of David Burns' Feeling Good Handbook. The basic premise of this book is if you want to feel better, you must realize that your thoughts and attitudes – not external events – create your feelings. Distorted thinking results in bad feelings...recognizing your cognitive distortions can lead to better feelings.

The cognitive distortions as outlined in the Feeling Good Handbook and can be found here:

1. All-or-nothing thinking: You see things in black and white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.

2. Overgeneralization: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.

3. Mental filter: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors the entire beaker of water.

4. Disqualifying the positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting they "don't count" for some reason or other. You maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.

5. Jumping to conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.

6. Mind reading: You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you and don't bother to check it out.

7. The Fortune Teller Error: You anticipate that things will turn out badly and feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.

8. Magnification (catastrophizing) or minimization: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else's achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow's imperfections). This is also called the "binocular trick."

9. Emotional reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: "I feel it, therefore it must be true."

10. Should statements: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn'ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. "Musts" and "oughts" are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.

11. Labeling and mislabeling: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: "I'm a loser." When someone else's behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him, "He's a damn louse." Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.

12. Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event for which, in fact, you were not primarily responsible.