Mount TBR #40

I read this book for Mount TBR Reading Challenge 2019.

How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable about Anything - Yes, Anything – Albert Ellis

I think it is reasonable to brush up on living skills so I keep and re-read self-help books by psychologist Albert Ellis (1913 - 2007) when I want to remind myself of the suggestions of cognitive behavioral therapy. With winter giving me more stress than usual, I thought it would do no harm to read this classic of self-help.

Ellis gives the ABC model. It helps me to calm down by understanding how my thoughts, feelings and behavior interact. Let’s say the activating event (A) is the onset of winter.

Next, I form B, my beliefs about winter. It’s so cold. My skin will dry out, my eyelids will itch. I gotta use extra face creams. The snow will cancel classes, breaking the rhythm of the term, and causing make-up sessions. What a hassle. Not to mention the danger of Dear Hearts and Gentle People in traffic driving too fast and too slow. Shoveling the white stuff will give me a damn coronary. The winter will last forever; February has nothing to recommend it. I get so sick of wearing all the damn clothes. It gets dark so damn early. And is grey the rest of the time.

Then, I get my C, the consequence, the result of my going over yet again my beliefs about the onset of winter. Oddly enough, I feel miserable and even panicky about this winter being the winter that will kill me.

Ellis argues that it is my own wretched beliefs about the agony of winter that leads to my distraught feelings, my agitated foreboding, my gloomy predictions about winter causing my cold, lonely death, shovel in hand, in the dark, in the middle of my long snowy driveway where nobody will discover my prostrate carcass until it is too late. Or they will resuscitate me and I will have brain damage, thank you very much.

With these pessimistic thoughts, I make myself upset, not other people crying about winter, not the climate which features winter five months in the year. Me, I'm the one responsible for my useless agitation.

Ellis would advise that I use D, disputing my irrational thoughts, by asking myself, Just what is the evidence that Mother Nature is planning to kill you this winter. There is no such evidence. I do not fit into the group that is at greatest risk of dying while shoveling snow. I am not habitually sedentary and I have no known or suspected coronary disease. Keep exercising. Resist sugar and carb cravings. Keep up the fish oil and Vitamin D.  I use reason (or what is reasonable to me) to develop and support my disputing ideas. And I focus on what I can control: my own responses, my own will, the one thing that I have power over, the one thing that cannot be taken from me.

Finally, E are the cognitive and emotional effects of my revised beliefs. By being rational, by thinking things through, I feel better. Quit plaguing myself with the gloomy thoughts, idiotic inventions of fear, hobgoblins of anxiety. Shake my head, clear the cobwebs and move on.

Ellis’ advice is that I had better replace irrational self-talk with more realistic and evidence-based self-talk. A statement like "I’m stressed about winter " can be acknowledged as true enough, but I can follow this up with, "But I will nevertheless deal with it and I will probably do OK. I've done so in past." This leads to a calmer, more rational assessment of the situation and a healthier response to what happens.