Deep Cognitive Disputation of Rules

What happens if you focus on the paradoxical nature of your irrational beliefs?

One of the basic techniques of cognitive therapy involves identifying irrational thoughts and asking yourself: Where’s the evidence for that? Passing thoughts tend to reveal more stable underlying beliefs, which usually become the main focus of therapy over time. There are many techniques that can assist us in evaluating the evidence for and against our own troubling beliefs. It’s also helpful to evaluate the “pros and cons” of beliefs that take the form of implicit or explicit rules. For example, “I must always control my emotions”, “People have to respect me” or “Life should be fair.” These rules, or rigid demands, often appear central to our emotional problems — hence therapists often refer to them as The Tyranny of the Shoulds.

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One of the most common techniques for challenging such beliefs consists in drawing two columns, often on a flipchart, used to list the “pros and cons” of the belief. Some clients will, at first, only list the disadvantages (“cons”). This can be misleading. The fact that they believe it at all, let alone so strongly, when upset, suggests that there must be some reasons why it appears helpful or necessary to accept this rule in the heat of the moment. It’s particularly important to root out those hidden reasons for clinging onto an unhelpful way of thinking, so that they can be subjected to more careful evaluation.

However, it’s one thing to realize, in retrospect, that our beliefs and actions are not helpful. It’s another to really grasp that in the heat of the moment. If you can learn to notice when a belief is active and simultaneously perceive it as worthless and self-defeating, you will loosen its grip on your mind and you will typically also weaken its effect upon your emotions. That comes from repeatedly disputing the irrational belief in the right way, until an alternative perspective becomes habitual and second nature to you. That’s made easier if the disputation is both powerful and concise.

In this article, I want to focus on what I consider to be one of the most effective ways of challenging a rule or “should”. That consists in drawing attention to the fact that, in ways you previously overlooked, your belief may actually be self-defeating. It’s not just false, it’s the opposite of the truth. It’s not just unhelpful, it’s the opposite of what you want. These sorts of rules attempt to solve a problem, but actually make it worse. You’re trying to fix things, but actually breaking them more and more. Like throwing gasoline on a fire to try to put it out. Like trying to dig your way out of a hole, and just getting stuck deeper and deeper. Or trying to free yourself from a net, only to make yourself more entangled the harder you struggle. These sorts of rules are a trap.

Why do we Have Irrational Beliefs?

First, I want to discuss some of the reasons why a belief might seem convincing when we’re highly emotional, even if it seems irrational to us later, when we’ve calmed down. As the philosopher Spinoza once wrote:

Human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions I name bondage: for, when a man is a prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune: so much so, that he is often compelled, while seeing that which is better for him, to follow that which is worse. — Ethica, IV, preface, my italics

The fact that we often persist in ways of acting that are obviously doing us more harm than good, used to be known in psychology as the Neurotic Paradox. It’s one of the central challenges for self-improvement.

To help shed some light on this anomaly, it may be useful to repeatedly ask yourself these two questions about a specific belief (e.g., “I must always succeed”):

1. When I’m most upset, or the last time I became upset about this, how strongly did I believe this, from 0-100%?

2. Now that I’ve no longer upset, how helpful, objectively speaking, is it to hold this belief, rated from 0-100%?

We sometimes call this the difference between “hot” and “cold” cognitions. Noticing the difference between what you believe when emotional versus what you believe when feeling calm and rational is the easy part for most people. Now comes a harder question. Assuming you rated the first question higher: why are those numbers different?

That’s a difficult question. Most people tend to say, at first, “I don’t know.” They might say “Because it feels more believable when I’m upset” or “Because it feels necessary sometimes”. That’s a circular explanation, though — it doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. The big question is: Why do these rules seem more believable or more necessary, when you’re upset and less believable when you’re not upset? There are several possible answers. One that I find useful is that when we become highly emotional our awareness tends to become more narrow in scope and focused on potential threats.

This leads to a bias called selective attention. We behave as if we’re dealing with a crisis and ignoring extraneous information, we focus exclusively on the perceived problem. That may be useful in a real emergency. However, it comes at a great cost. Selective thinking, during heightened emotion, tends to make us ignore certain evidence relating to our beliefs and to ignore some of the consequences of our actions. In particular, emotional stress can temporarily inhibit thinking about the longer-term consequences of our actions.

That narrow focus can make beliefs seem convincing in the heat of the moment, which seem very unconvincing when we’ve calmed down and are able to consider the consequences of our rigid rules in a more balanced way. To put it simply, we tend to forget all of our reasons for adopting healthier attitudes when we’re highly emotional and our attention becomes focused on our immediate problem. That leads to other cognitive biases such as:

• Exaggeration, because we ignore conflicting evidence

• Overgeneralization, because we ignore the exceptions to our belief

• Unfounded assumptions, because we ignore alternative possibilities

We can list the evidence against a belief or negative consequences of holding it in more detail when we’re feeling calm and rational. We can repeat this exercise many times, write down our reasons for rejecting an irrational belief, discuss them with a therapist, repeat them aloud, condense them, and integrate them more deeply in other ways, so that we’re more likely to remember them even when we become highly emotional. In this way, we can gradually change the unhelpful beliefs that become activated, even during intense depression, anger, or anxiety.

Cost-Benefit Analysis

Let’s focus on evaluating the “pros and cons” of a rule — sometimes called cost-benefit analysis. There are three main ways in which this may weaken your level of belief.

1. If you identify more costs or disadvantages (“cons”) than before, or you come to believe they are more serious than before.

2. If you start to question whether some of the perceived benefits or advantages (“pros”) are real.

3. If you conclude that the perceived benefits are not only illusory but that holding the belief actually achieves the opposite.

Of all the reasons that we can muster against holding an unhealthy belief, this third type may be the most powerful: evidence that it is actually self-defeating. By that, I mean that even the residual motives that we have for holding a belief are false and, in a sense, the opposite is true. Put bluntly, in many cases, we find that the perceived benefits of a belief are not only illusory but holding the belief actually achieves the opposite. Let me give you some examples:

• “I have to drink alcohol to relax in social situations” — But what if, in the long-term, it turns out that it actually does the opposite by fueling your social anxiety?

• “Yelling at my kids is the only way I can get them to listen to me” — What if over time that causes them to lose respect for you, though, and to question your authority?

• “I must worry about my problems to cope with them” — What if worrying clouds your judgment, stresses you more, and actually makes you much worse at solving problems?

• “I must strive for perfection if I want to avoid failure” — What if it does the total opposite by leading to greater fatigue, procrastination, and avoidance over time?

• “People must respect me” — What if rigidly demanding respect from others too rigidly actually backfires by making them lose respect for you?

• “I have to ruminate about the causes of my depression to find a solution” — But what if dwelling on the problem is actually making you more depressed?

Really drawing your attention to the fact that a course of action does the opposite of what you want is a very powerful way of weakening your belief in it. We can call these sorts of rules paradoxical because they are ultimately self-defeating. Ironically, the harder you try to make things better, by following these sorts of rigid rules, the worse they tend to become. You’re basically just digging yourself into a deeper hole. They’re not just unhelpful — it’s worse than that — they’re profoundly self-defeating. It’s as if you’re trying your hardest to get somewhere in life with these rules but they’re taking you in the opposite direction.

Spotting Paradoxical Beliefs

There are a couple of questions which can help you to spot the counter-productive nature of certain beliefs or actions:

• Does this belief feel or appear as if it’s doing one thing while actually doing the opposite?

• Does this belief potentially make the very problem it's trying to solve worse rather than better?

These additional questions may help you dig even deeper into the counter-productive nature of your beliefs:

• Does it benefit you in certain situations but backfire in most others, thereby achieving the opposite overall?

• Does it benefit you in a limited way but prevent you from doing something that would potentially be more beneficial?

• Might your belief potentially affect other people in a way that is the opposite of what you want?

• Does it seem to benefit you in the short term but actually do the opposite over the long-term?

Let’s apply those to a common example: “I must always get things perfectly right to avoid a catastrophic failure” or “My perfectionism motivates me to work harder and thereby helps me to succeed.”

• Perhaps it feels like your perfectionism is helping you to succeed but, objectively speaking, if you think about it, you’re less successful than other people who have more flexible attitudes.

• Perhaps your rigid perfectionism causes you to make more mistakes than normal, or avoid learning from harmless mistakes in a way that would help you to make progress.

• Perhaps it works for certain simple short-term tasks but backfires dramatically when you try to apply that level of perfectionism to more complex situations where greater tolerance of mistakes would make more sense.

• Perhaps it does motivate you to some extent but coming to depend on it too much has actually prevented you from developing healthy and flexible motivational strategies that would help you to succeed more consistently.

• Perhaps it motivates you to succeed in the short term but leads to greater frustration and fatigue in the long-term, which undermines your motivation, and causes subtle avoidance and procrastination, which can backfire and lead to failure.

Sometimes it’s obvious that a belief or action is backfiring, like you’re trying to put out a fire by dousing it in gasoline. Often, though, it’s a bit more subtle, and you may need to think carefully about how your efforts at a solution could be making the problems worse.

Conclusion

It’s easier to notice how other people’s rigid beliefs may backfire dramatically. You probably have probably met someone who tried way too hard to be your friend and actually drove you away as a result. You may notice people desperate to control a situation, who end up making it worse and causing more chaos. The world is full of people who wanted so badly to succeed that they inevitably failed. We all try too hard sometimes, and end up achieving the opposite of what we want. Usually that’s because we’re approaching things in an overly-rigid way, rather than being flexible and adaptive enough in our approach.

As the philosopher Wittgenstein put it, therapy consists in showing the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. The early 20th century flytrap design he probably had in mind is shown in the photo below. It’s a great illustration of the Neurotic Paradox. Flies are drawn to the bait inside the glass bottle, entering through the hole in the bottom. They get stuck because they instinctively fly upwards to escape threats — “I must fly upwards or else I will die!” They keep banging against the top of the glass, trying harder and harder to escape, until they become exhausted and die in the bottom of the bottle. Flying upwards usually works, but not in this situation. Their rigid “rule” about how to escape danger is, ironically, precisely what kills them in the end.

Realizing that your rules are backfiring and getting you the opposite of what you want potentially forces you to reconsider the perceived benefits that motivated you to cling on to that way of thinking. You’re in “psychological quicksand”, and the more you fight and struggle to get out, the deeper you’re sinking. It would be better for you to pause and give yourself a moment to think of an alternative solution.

You often have to see this happening in the heat of the moment, though, in order to really shatter your belief in the old rule. It’s not just that it’s not working. That might lead you to think that instead of replacing it with a more flexible way of thinking, you should just try harder, more forcefully, or more aggressively to apply your rigid rule: “Try doing more of the same!” But the more effort you make to follow these paradoxical rules, the more they’re going to blow up in your face. Spot the self-defeating nature of your beliefs in the heat of the moment, really focus your mind on the insight that they’re not helping, and back yourself out of the trap created by these paradoxical rules.