A Powerful Tool For Your Happiness: REBT
Many of us have established “being happy” as one of our main goals in life. However, our own self-talk often interferes with our ability to achieve this goal. We express our beliefs through our self-talk, and these beliefs can be rational or irrational. While rational beliefs are realistic, irrational beliefs are those that don’t accurately represent the world. There are several categories of irrational beliefs, and we’ve all been guilty of having thoughts that fall into one or more of these categories at some point or another.
One of the best ways to increase our happiness is to replace “irrational” self-talk with more realistic and adaptive self-talk. This blog will explain a great tool for doing this; it’s called Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT).
The philosophical basis of REBT is the principle that a person is not affected emotionally by the events that take place in his or her life, but rather by his or her interpretation of these outside events. In short, our thoughts cause our emotions.
Keep reading to discover how you can begin to apply REBT in your own life in order to increase your happiness.
Albert Ellis created the ABC Model to demonstrate the link between our beliefs, and our feelings and behaviors. Here’s how the ABC Model works:
A – Activating Event (Something happens which is the activating event, or the trigger).
B – Beliefs (You have certain thoughts about the event that occurred; your thoughts are based on your beliefs.)
C – Consequences (As a consequence of the thoughts that you have about the event that took place, you feel certain emotions. These emotions lead you to take some action.)
Here’s an example:
Your friend Sarah, passes by you as you walk down the street. You call out a greeting, but she just walks on by.
You have the following thought: “She’s ignoring me; she must not have liked me. I must not be very likable.”
You feel hurt, sad, and resentful.
Of course, the ABC model doesn’t just end there. The next step is to begin to identify your irrational, self-defeating beliefs–which are rigid, extreme, unrealistic, and illogical and absolutist–, and then question and dispute them. In our example of Sarah, you could ask yourself questions such as the following:
Am I sure that Sarah saw me?
Could it be that she was distracted?
What if she was just having a bad day?
And so on…
The last step is to replace your irrational beliefs with more rational and self-helping ones. Here are some examples:
Sarah must not have seen me.
If Sarah did ignore me, that’s a reflection of her need to work on her social skills; it says nothing about me.
We all have bad days; I should give Sarah the benefit of the doubt.
Basically, you need to develop a more rational and self-constructive philosophy of yourself, others, and the world. By doing this, you can alter your emotional responses to what happens to you and respond to the world around you in a more life-serving and adaptive way. And this will go a long way toward increasing your happiness.
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