How to Change your Response to a Situation

Outlining some ways in which CBT can be used to prepare for the future

One of the most common questions that people ask me, in coaching or therapy, is some variation of “How do I make sure I respond differently to problems in the future?” What they mean is that they’ve tried journalling, meditation, and a load of other therapy and self-help, which they feel has been of some benefit, but it hasn’t actually helped them respond differently in real situations, which trigger old habits, anger, anxiety, or other responses they want to change. They often say their old response happens so quickly they don’t feel in control. And they clearly feel stuck!

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a long time and never have time so today I’ve set myself the challenge of writing this stream-of-consciousness style, in one go, off the top of my head! Well, first of all, this is a common — virtually universal — problem in therapy. So we have well-worn methods for dealing with it, meaning that I’m basically about to describe how other people have overcome the same obstacle. In broad terms, there are three complementary solutions: develop appropriate coping skills, rehearse the situation in advance, and change the attitudes that make you prone to the old response.

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1. Coping Skills

The first answer is that you learn appropriate coping skills, and how to use them. Most people will say “I’ve done that already!” But usually they’ve learned the wrong coping skills, haven’t practiced them, haven’t adapted them to the needs of the situation, or aren’t noticing the right cues to use them. I call this “reactive coping” to be specific, because we’re talking about responding in the heat of the moment. The other two strategies I describe below will make this much easier, but we have to start by building appropriate reactive coping skills. I’ll link to an article at the end, called Coping with your Emotions, which goes into more detail about the generic coping skills that I teach most clients.

In brief, my view is that the best response to anxiety, or anger, for instance, is to begin by instructing yourself to slow down. Rushing into things is clearly going to mean losing control. So you usually need to buy time, even if it’s just a few seconds. You could think of this as a prerequisite for other coping skills. Stephen Covey talks about the gap between stimulus and response — that’s what you want to expand first. There are several ways of doing this but the simplest is just to use what we call “self-instruction” and literally say to yourself, in your head, “Whoa, slow down, hold your horses, buddy, take a moment before you do anything else here!”, or words to that effect. At first this tends to be more conscious and deliberate but your goal is to “fade” out the verbal instructions over time, so that you just do the behavior without always having to talk yourself through doing it. Think of it this way: you’re behaving like a performance coach, inside your own head, by talking yourself through coping with the emotion.

Secondly, alongside this, you’re going to want to tell yourself to “pay attention” to what the heck is going on. Shifting attention onto the crucial aspects of the experience is essential. Strong emotions often distract our attention from what matters. How can you change your response unless you’re paying attention to it properly? So focus. You can call this “mindfulness” or “self-awareness”. You probably want to pay attention, in particular, to your own actions, and how your thoughts, or evaluations, are shaping your emotions, in the present moment, as it happens.

The third component, which I think is virtually essential to most emotional coping strategies, is that you’re going to want to stop identifying your initial impressions with reality. No enraged person ever thinks “Right now I have the impression this guy is a jerk and it seems to me that he may deserve a punch on the nose”. Enraged people think: “This guy is a jerk and he does deserve a punch on the nose!” It’s not experienced as a subjective opinion; it’s experienced as if it were an objective fact. Opinions or impressions have become identified, or fused, with reality. There are several names for this but I usually call it “cognitive defusion”. So long as you go along with that and fuse your thoughts with reality, your goose is basically cooked, my friend. You’ve already been captured by your own angry opinions — you’re trapped inside them, and that has become your angry world. So you better stop that from happening, if you want to regain your freedom, okay?

Epictetus taught his students to say to troubling impressions: “You are just an impression, and not at all the thing you claim to represent!” Epictetus was a very smart guy, and way ahead of his time in this regard. You can abbreviate this by just telling yourself: “I’m evaluating this as awful right now” rather than “This is awful.” As Korzybski said — be conscious of the “is” of identity. Treat it as an activity you’re engaged in, rather than an objective fact about events. When people evaluate events as catastrophic we call that “catastrophizing” — you’re the one doing it. You have to regain that sense of ownership and self-awareness, if you want to free yourself from the emotional trance you’re in.

A lot of clients today have some of these coping skills already, although they usually need to be adapted. Often people have learned self-help techniques that are actually unhelpful, especially if they subtly function as forms of avoidance. Often they have learned techniques that might work, but take too long. Under stress, in the heat of the moment, while there’s a lot going on, people can normally only manage to perform what I would call “low bandwidth” reactive coping techniques, which are very rapid and don’t require too much thought. So I’d recommend beginning with the very basic and generic skills I described above, and learn to do them in a few seconds. Practice, practice, practice, until they become second nature. If you never practice a skill, it’s no surprise that you’re going to be unable to use it properly when you actually need it. So get to work on it, until it’s almost automatic.

The main point of failure, in most cases, though is that people don’t notice the cues to use these skills early enough. You can help yourself “nip it in the bud” and “catch the problem early”, in a number of ways. The first is to be crystal clear about the high-risk situations and high-risk states, in which you’re more likely to experience the problem. This may seem like common sense, but people often forget to do it. It’s basic preparation. If you tend to lose your temper when you’re in a “pre-anger” state such as being tired, being hungry, having a headache, and so on, and in situations or environments where there’s a lot of noise, or time pressure, or people are talking about politics, you would be well-advised to ready yourself in advance for dealing with stressful situations under those conditions. Go into the situation prepared, on the lookout for the typical triggers and early-warning signs of your old response, so that you can catch it early, and deploy your coping skills more efficiently.

Finally, you should notice the early-warning signs. Study your reactions carefully. I’ve worked with thousands of individuals over the years who told me they practised “mindfulness” every day, and who, somehow, were totally oblivious to the obvious signs that they were becoming anxious or enraged — signs that any observer would have noticed in their facial expression, for example, or the sound of their voice. People tend to massively overestimate their own level of self-awareness, and to underestimate the big gaps or holes that powerful emotions create in our awareness. Train yourself to notice things that previously went unnoticed. Imagine holding up a mirror to your irrational emotions. Let’s get specific. What exactly do you see?

Here’s my favourite example: Charles Darwin goes on at length in his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) about the muscles in your forehead. Darwin noted that humans, like many animals, constrict the corrugator supercilii muscles, frowning by drawing the eyebrows down and together, and wrinkling the brow, when they are angry, frustrated, or worried. Modern electromyography (EMG) studies, measuring the facial muscles during emotion, have consistently shown that Darwin was spot on in this regard. People do usually tense those muscles when frustrated, even if it’s barely visible. You might practice mindfulness for decades without ever noticing that you’re doing that, though. So think more carefully about what’s going on in your body and mind, and look hard for the early-warning signs of strong emotions. Say “That’s my signal to slow down, pay attention to what’s going on in my mind, and notice how I’m evaluating this situation right now!” — or words to that effect.

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2. Rehearsal

Okay, from now on things become a bit simpler. You’re far more likely to be able to use your coping skills in real situations if you practice, practice, practice. You can do that by using them in a wide range of other situations. For example, look out for any minor hassles in daily life that cause stress and think to yourself “Hey, this is a great opportunity to practice those same coping skills that I want to be able to use for really stressful situations in the future!” Don’t be lazy, learning any skill requires practice. Luckily for you, in this case, it’s not like you’re learning to play the cello or something. It’s more like a simple motor skill, such as tying your shoelaces. You’ll probably begin making progress immediately and certainly within a couple of weeks, with more or less daily practice, you should be finding it you can use the coping skills you’re learning much more quickly, easily, flexibly, and automatically.

Even better, rehearse the skills under stress by using your imagination to simulate exposure to the high-risk situations, and the triggers, and experience the early-warning signs or initial phase of the emotion. You can do that by role-playing conversations — that’s common in assertiveness training or in some therapy sessions. You could do it by watching a video, say, of spiders, if you have arachnophobia. The most common way to simulate exposure, though, is just by shutting your eyes and imagining the trigger situation is happening now — we can call that “imaginal exposure” or “mental rehearsal”. So you could be doing that every day, to prepare yourself for situations that normally trigger your problem. Evidence consistently shows that imaginal exposure works well for a variety of problems, especially anxiety.

There are two options here. You could relive a recent memory of an event where you experienced anger or anxiety, and “redo” it by using your coping skills. Or you could imagine a hypothetical situation in the future. My advice is usually to start with memories, because they tend to be more evocative of the emotion and easier to imagine in most cases. The very act of imagining things repeatedly, and for long enough, tends to lead to what psychologists call “emotional habituation”, where feelings, especially anxiety, peak and then wear off gradually. So the most common mistake people make here is not being patient enough. In traditional exposure work, people were often encouraged to continue until the emotion naturally declined to a negligible level, such as 1-2 out of 10 on a subjective scale. That works but you can also benefit by proving that you can tolerate the feeling without escaping, suppressing it, or reverting to the old habit. In any case, you should be careful your attitude is one of accepting the uncomfortable feelings, and letting them run their course, rather than trying to suppress or avoid them, which can prevent real improvement or even backfire in some cases.

Perhaps the easiest way to do this consistently is by listening to an appropriate audio recording, which guides you through the process. Mental rehearsal and exposure are basically forms of conditioning, common in behavior therapy. You’re creating new habits, and learning, through repetition. That ideally means that when you find yourself, even by surprise, in a situation that normally triggers your problem, your nervous system will have been conditioned to respond differently, making it much easier and more natural for you to employ the coping skills we described above.

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3. Cognitive Therapy

Finally, having spoken about skills and conditioning, basically behavior therapy, we’re now going to talk more about cognitive therapy. Cognitive therapy may consist in changing the things you actually say to yourself in your head, by repeating coping statements or self-instructions, as noted above. However, usually today we’re talking more about changing cognitive structures, known as “schemas”, or underlying irrational beliefs. These are trait-like enduring attitudes, which predispose you to respond in certain ways to the trigger situations. For instance, if deep down I believe that making mistakes in public is AWFUL and that I MUST avoid it at all costs, otherwise it means I’m a worthless FAILURE then, of course, I’ll be prone to social anxiety. Learning coping skills can help me deal with that anxiety, at a superficial level at first, although with practice we now know, changing behavior often leads to deeper cognitive change. In particular, you can prove to yourself in practice that you’re able to cope with your feelings. So using coping skills can be understood as a type of “behavioral experiment”, which potentially leads to schema change, by disproving certain old unhealthy attitudes.

In other words, research has shown that behavior therapy can lead to cognitive change. However, we can also work more directly on underlying beliefs by using Socratic questioning and other classic cognitive therapy techniques. I can only touch on the methods for doing that briefly here but the key point is that if you change your underlying attitudes, especially ones that are evaluative (“This is awful!”, “I am worthless!”, “He is an idiot!”) or prescriptive (“I MUST succeed!”, “You MUST respect me!”, “Life SHOULD be fair!”), you will tend to change your proneness to certain problematic emotions and behaviors.

First you need to identify what those beliefs are. You can frame them in different ways but I agree with Albert Ellis, the original pioneer of CBT, that typically the best option is to root out any rigid demands (“MUST”, “NEED”, etc.) you are imposing on yourself, other people, or events, and dispute those vigorously. Your rigid demands are a recipe for neurosis as they’re bound to be violated, which inevitably leads to frustration and emotional distress — therapists used to like to call this “The Tyranny of the Shoulds”. “People SHOULD respect me!”, well they’re bound not to sometimes. So then what? You get frustrated and angry. Neurotic disturbance follows rigid demands like night follows day. It’s kind of staring you in the face, to be honest. “This MUST not happen”, and it does, so you get upset.

Ellis believed, and I agree, that rather than simply abandoning those sorts of irrational demands, you would do better to correct them and replace them with rational preferences. You can usually do that by disputing the old beliefs. Ask yourself where the evidence is that you MUST always succeed. (Spoiler alert: there is none.) Where the heck is it written in stone that you MUST? (Nowhere.) Does everyone else, especially people you admire, share the same rigid demand about similar situations? How is it logical to demand that something MUST not happen if it’s bound to happen sooner or later? How is it rational to demand that something MUST happen if it’s not up to you and not under your direct control? Where does it get you in the long run to impose this rigid demand on yourself? (Clue: it keeps making you upset, causes you stress, and then where does that lead you?) You get the idea. Really push yourself, though. Often, I find that people who swear they’ve already disputed their irrational beliefs have done a half-hearted job. Irrational beliefs are sneaky. It can take effort, perseverance, and diligence, to really break them.

Finally, all this disputation will lead inexorably to the conclusion that there’s probably a more rational, realistic, and constructive way to think about your problems. That can often be summed up as a rational statement of belief like “I would highly prefer it if people respected me but I don’t NEED them to do so”, “When I make mistakes it’s highly undesirable but it’s not AWFUL”, “I really don’t like going to the dentist, but it’s not UNBEARABLE, I can cope”, or “If someone doesn’t like me, that’s too bad, but it doesn’t make me UNLOVABLE”, and so on. You get the idea. Disputation is the workhorse that makes these rational beliefs more meaningful. But practice, practice, practice, telling them to yourself, if you want to make them habitual, and second nature. Practice them under stress, with conviction and emotion. Think, act, and feel, as if you really believe what you’re saying, and are willing yourself to adopt a more philosophical attitude to adversity. Doing this between times will make it easier for you to consciously recall your philosophical attitude in the heat of the moment, perhaps alongside the coping skills described earlier.

Conclusion

Of course, there are other ways you could approach things, and other coping skills, or self-help strategies you could practice. For instance, some people want to learn relaxation techniques, and apply them rapidly in stressful situations. Research shows that people who cope well with stress exhibit coping flexibility. They have options, and adapt to different circumstances. The ideal solution is to learn some basic skills thoroughly, and apply them consistently, but also to have more than one string to your bow, and to be able to combine methods and tweak them to suit your needs.

Ideally, you would combine all three approaches above, and attack your problem from different angles. Many people do benefit from focusing primarily on just one of these angles. CBT tends to favour the combined approach. Don’t overload yourself, though. Take one step at a time, whether you choose to begin with reactive coping skills, mental rehearsal, or cognitive disputation.

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