What Irrational Beliefs?

How REBT can help you spot where you're going wrong

In the 1950s, Albert Ellis developed the original form of modern cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). Ellis’ initially called his approach “Rational Therapy” but it eventually became known as Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT). He had read Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius in his teens and drew more heavily on Stoic philosophy than any other famous psychotherapist. REBT is, moreover, often described as being the most philosophical approach to CBT.

I take inspiration from both Stoicism and REBT in my own coaching practice, and in the books that I write. Ellis was a New Yorker who expressed his ideas in blunt language — that was both a strength and a weakness. His down-to-earth style resonated with his clients, and readers, but meant that his work sometimes struggled to get the attention it deserved from academic psychologists and researchers.

Over a decade after Ellis began developing REBT, Aaron T. Beck, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, introduced a very similar approach called cognitive therapy (CT), which stole the limelight to some extent from Ellis’ work. Many variations of cognitive therapy appeared. These are grouped under the blanket term cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) because they combine Beck’s approach, and sometimes Ellis’, with the established theory and practice of behaviour therapy.

Ellis agreed with the Stoics that emotional disturbance is caused, to a greater extent than most people assume, by irrational beliefs. He quoted the famous saying of Epictetus in most of his books and taught it to all of his clients and students.

People are disturbed not by events but by their opinions about them.

This premise continued to be important throughout the history of CBT, although I think Ellis articulated it in a very clear way, that’s still compelling and has some practical advantages.

Ellis liked to describe his approach as more philosophical than CBT. Beck avoided referring to “irrational” beliefs and, instead, spoke of negative automatic thoughts and dysfunctional (unhelpful) beliefs. However, Ellis went further than Beck by insisting that our core negative and unhelpful beliefs are also deeply irrational. I think that’s an important difference because by questioning whether they could ever be true or helpful, we can potentially dispute these sorts of beliefs more profoundly, and transform them in a more lasting way.

The ABC Model

Before we look at specific examples of irrational beliefs, it’s important to explain what Ellis called his ABC model. Most people tend to use stimulus-response language to describe their motions and other reactions to events. They say things like “My husband rolled his eyes, and that made me angry” or “I lost my favourite toenail clippers, and that made me sad.” Ellis argued, following Epictetus, that it is not events that upset us, however, but our beliefs about them.

He illustrated this using the letters ABC, where A stands for “Activating event” (or sometimes “Adversity”). You can think of this as the trigger or stimulus. C stands for “Consequences” and includes your thoughts, actions and especially your feelings about A. REBT begins by filling in the gap, the missing B, which stands for your “Beliefs”. For example:

• A: The response was activated by losing my favourite toenail clippers.

• B: I irrationally believed that “I MUST never lose important things, otherwise it means I’m totally INCOMPETENT.”

• C: The consequences were that I felt sad, cried for hours, and refused to come out of my room.

Although we talk as if A causes C, if that were true everyone would respond to A in more or less the same manner. The truth is that A+B causes C — our beliefs shape our thoughts, actions, and feelings, to a greater extent than we normally acknowledge. Ellis considered this the most important thing for clients to grasp at the outset of treatment.

Insight No. 1: You largely choose to disturb yourself about the unpleasant events of your life, although you may be encouraged to do so by external happenings and by social learning. You mainly feel the way you think. When obnoxious and frustrating things happen to you at point A (Activating Events or Adversities), you consciously or unconsciously select Rational Beliefs (RBs) that lead you to feel sad and regretful and you also select Irrational Beliefs (IBs) that lead you to feel anxious, depressed, and self-hating. — Albert Ellis, How to Maintain and Enhance Your Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy Gains

As Ellis frequently pointed out himself, that’s basically what Epictetus and other Stoics were saying two thousand or more years ago.

The goal of REBT is therefore to dispute certain irrational beliefs and replace them with rational ones. Now lets do a deep dive into the sorts of irrational beliefs that typically cause us problems.

Rigid Demands

Ellis concluded that the root cause of most people’s problems consists in the tendency to replace strong desires, which are natural, rational, flexible and adaptive, with extreme demands, which are unhealthy, irrational, rigid and maladaptive. He liked to call this “musterbation” because it often takes the form of beliefs such as “I MUST always succeed” or “People MUST respect me” or “Life MUST be fair.” These irrational beliefs can be expressed in the form of “SHOULD”, “HAVE TO”, “GOT TO”, “NEED TO”, and in other ways but their essence is that they treat your desires as rigid necessities.

Thought experiment. Take even a strong desire or preferences and conjoin it with an assertion that what you desire is not the case. For example:

• “I strongly desire that I succeed… but have, in reality, failed.”

• “I greatly prefer that people respect me… but, in fact, they sometimes do not.”

• “I passionately desire life to be fair… but, hey, it often turns out not to be.”

Tough luck, I guess, but it’s not the end of the world. You’re probably disappointed but not tearing your hair out about it. However, notice what happens if you turn those into rigid demands:

• “I MUST always succeed… but I have failed!”

• “I absolutely NEED people to respect me… but sometimes they do the opposite!”

• “Life has GOT TO be fair… but it just isn’t!”

That sounds odd, right? Each of these actually sounds a bit self-contradictory. How can you rigidly demand something that you already know is not really going to happen? That’s what I like to call a recipe for neurosis. As you’re bound to get what you don’t want, you’re inevitably going to be frustrated and upset. You may as well say to yourself “I MUST get what I want… otherwise I’m going to freak out!”

Try another thought experiment:

• “I MUST always succeed… but success is not 100% up to me.”

• “I NEED people to respect me… but it’s not down to me whether or not they do.”

• “Life has GOT TO be fair… but that’s not under my control.”

Doesn’t that also sound rather nonsensical? How can you demand that something be the case unless it’s actually under your control? And is anything really 100% under your control except your current intention? All external outcomes are at least partially in the hands of Fate. So where does that leave your demands? Desires are adaptive because, whatever else they do, they don’t deny reality. Demands are a form of self-deception. Whenever I believe something absolutely MUST not go against my wishes, I’m trying to kid myself that it’s impossible and will never happen. In the real world, that’s bound to lead to frustration unless you happen to have godlike omnipotence.

Often people doubt at first whether their beliefs are really this extreme. That’s natural. Your brain goes in and out of different states in which it temporarily believes different things, and your beliefs may become more flexible or inflexible, depending on your mood. Sitting in your armchair, with your slippers on, relaxing with a warm mug of cocoa, you may think to yourself “It would be nice if people approved of me, sure, but it’s no big deal if sometimes they don’t.” That’s your prefrontal cortex (PFC) talking — the mature and rational part of your brain. Very wise!

When under pressure, however, because you need to get to work on time but your kids have just drawn on the walls with crayons, and your wife looks at you like you’re making things worse by snapping at them, you may think differently. In the heat of the moment, your brain goes into a different mode, and suddenly you’re thinking “My wife NEEDS to respect me, otherwise what does that say about me? That I’m a complete and utter LOSER or something? That’s awful! I should be ashamed!” So you get angry, have a blazing argument, and before you know it you’re divorced and your kids hate you. (Hopefully not!)

So you may have to dig under the surface to find your lurking irrational beliefs. Extreme attitudes tends to come more to the fore when you’re upset or avoiding things. Often people overlook the problem because they think that their strong desires sufficiently explain their extreme emotions. One way to test that would be to affirm the desire while simultaneously negating the rigid demands. For example:

• “I passionately desire success… but I do not HAVE TO succeed.”

• “I love it when people respect me… but they do not NEED to do so.”

• “I really wish life was fair… but it does not HAVE TO be.”

Most people realize when they really imagine experiencing things this way that it is indeed the rigid demand, and not the desire, no matter how strongly felt, that’s causing the problem. Having a strong desire for things to go your way isn’t going to cause intense frustration. Believing it’s a dire necessity for things to go your way will, however, prime your brain to explode.

Another thought experiment. Close your eyes and imagine the last time you were really upset — as if it’s happening right now. Relive the moment when your distress reached its peak, and focus on the aspect of the situation that upset you the most. First identify what your rational desires or preferences were. Did you want to succeed, or gain approval, or control events? Keep telling yourself your rational belief for a while, such as, “Hey, I desire things to be different, but I don’t need them to be.” Note how that attitude interacts with your feelings, and your urge to act in certain ways. You will probably observe that having a strong desire or preference (or aversion / dispreference) doesn’t cause severe emotional distress unless you escalate it into a rigid demand or extreme evaluative belief. Test that out in your imagination. Turn it into an extreme irrational belief such as “Things absolutely MUST be the way I want here, and if they’re not it’s utterly AWFUL, and UNBEARABLE - I cannot stand it!” Which one causes you more distress? Rational desires or irrational demands?

Another quick thought experiment. Imagine yourself in 2-3 upsetting situations from your recent past. Voluntarily turn up the intensity of your emotional distress. As your feelings begin to reach a peak, imagine yelling out spontaneously. What did you feel like saying or doing when you increased the emotion? Get examples from multiple situations. That may often shed light on the attitudes implicit in your distress. As the intensity of your emotion increases, you may notice that your attitude becomes more extreme. You will probably recognize in it some of the irrational beliefs below!

The three examples above are common but rigid beliefs can take different forms. We impose a variety of irrational demands on ourselves, other people, and events (or life in general). Rigid demands tend to be associated with all-or-nothing thinking. The more rigidly you demand something, the more likely you are to fear that not getting it will lead to something bad. For example, “I HAVE TO be loved, otherwise it means I’m totally UNLOVABLE” or “I MUST control my anxiety, otherwise I could make a fool of myself, which would be AWFUL.” As you can see, we tend to fear either the awful consequences of failure or the personal meaning that it has for us, and our self-esteem.

Ellis believed that the demand or MUST was usually the root of the problem. In any case, these sorts of beliefs tend to be closely intertwined. So when you dispute one you will often weaken the others, although it can also be helpful to target them separately. They can each be disputed in the same way, although there are also questions specific to each type of belief, which can be used.

Awfulizing

Ellis sometimes called this catastrophizing but over time that term took on a slightly different meaning. Catastrophizing tends to refer to inflating the probability and severity of an anticipated threat, whereas awfulizing, more simply, refers to the inflated severity of any event. People often feel (or rather when upset they believe) that not getting what they rigidly demand is awful. Ellis liked to say that means that it’s worse than 100% bad. It’s extremely bad. Too much to handle. “I MUST pass all my exams, otherwise my whole life will be RUINED!” It makes a crisis into a drama — a Greek tragedy!

It’s often been noted, even by the ancient Stoics, that anxiety is quite forward-looking. When we look back on setbacks, they often appear less than catastrophic. For example, most people feel that if their current relationship ended, or their marriage led to divorce, that would be disaster city. It’s unthinkable, right? Almost everyone today is in multiple long-term relationships over the course of their lives. Looking back many years later on the end of previous relationships, the fact they didn’t work out often seems bad but not awful. (Also try telling your current wife that you still feel divorcing your first wife was awful and the worst thing that ever happened to you!)

You know, it’s almost as if none of these things are objectively awful but what we mean is that we’re subjectively evaluating them as awful. That would explain why our evaluations change depending on the context, and evolve over time. What is green today will still have been green when you look back on it ten years from now. Suppose I lost a thousand bucks today. When I look back on it tomorrow, and even a decade later, it will still have been a thousand bucks, and not a single dollar less. That’s just an objective fact. But will it still be catastrophically awful? That’s a value judgment, and it’s subjective. When I’m ninety years old, I might be a billionaire and so a thousand bucks would be small change in retrospect. Who knows? The point is that the awfulness of things is not a fact, it’s just a value judgment.

The most philosophical attitude might be that it’s unpleasant, and maybe unhelpful, right now to lose a thousand bucks, but it’s not objectively awful. That might seem like mere wordplay at first but remember the experiments we did earlier. You’re unlikely to burst into tears, or at least not for long, just because you consider some setback to be temporarily very unhelpful. It’s extreme thinking that drives extreme emotions.

Often awfulizing may relate to past events, that have already happened, such as memories of unpleasant childhood experiences, in which case it can be linked with shame or depression. Or it may be conditional on something that never happens, such as believing “It would be AWFUL if everyone at work laughed at me and said my presentation was complete garbage!” Whereas CBT will often challenge the inflated probability estimates of the worst-case scenario, Ellis would often place more emphasis on confronting it and de-awfulizing it. That’s a more radical approach but I think he was right. Even if the impossible happened and everyone at work laughed you out of the room, and chased you down the street yelling “What an idiot!”, so what? Would that really be a complete disaster or would you survive? If you can recognize that none of these things are objectively awful, but only appear awful because you subjectively evaluate them to be so, then it doesn’t matter how unlikely your fears are, you’ll be able to experience them as highly unhelpful but not catastrophic.

Low Frustration Tolerance

In the 1960s, a researcher called Richard Lazarus developed what’s known as the “transactional” model of stress, a general conceptualization of emotional disturbance, which influenced most subsequent cognitive models. It is sometimes called the see-saw model because Lazarus attributed stress to the disparity between two factors called threat appraisal and coping appraisal.

This basically reinforced a distinction already present in REBT. Most CBT tends to focus primarily on the threat appraisal side of the equation, which is closely related to what Ellis called awfulizing. However, awfulizing tends to go hand-in-hand with a poor appraisal of coping, or sense of helplessness, which is similar to what Ellis called Low Frustration Tolerance (LFT) or I-can’t-stand-it-itis.

Photo by Pascal Bernardon on Unsplash

If you are facing even a very minor threat but your frustration or discomfort tolerance is low, you may feel distressed, and are likely to procrastinate or avoid the situation. On the other hand, if you are facing a very severe threat, and your frustration tolerance is low, you will feel completely and utterly overwhelmed. If you have high frustration tolerance, though, you will be emotionally resilient, and even a very severe problem may seem like a challenge to you rather than a threat.

Awfulizing and low frustration tolerance are often two sides of the same coin. “This is awful and unbearable — how will I cope?” Chronic worriers, in particular, tend to be prone to the toxic combination of catastrophic thinking plus low frustration tolerance. However, it’s also possible to be intolerant of even low levels of discomfort or frustration. People are intolerant of many aspects of life, such as:

• Feelings of anxiety, sadness, anger, tension, or frustration

• Feelings of tiredness, pain, or discomfort

• Difficulty, effort, and hard work

• Making mistakes or looking stupid

• Uncertainty, ambiguity, or not knowing

• Others who disagree with them or the threat of conflict

• Pressure, demands, or the complexity of tasks

• Having to be patient and wait for things

• Feeling urges or desires without acting on them

It may sometimes be extremely difficult or unpleasant to put up with these things but where is the evidence that it’s impossible?

If you allow yourself to say that it’s “overwhelming”, “too much”, or “you cannot cope” then you’re going to extremes in your thinking. In a sense, you’re signalling a feeling of helplessness and a desire to give up, or escape from the situation. However, if you accept the discomfort, and the occasional mistake, then doesn’t the record show that you are, in fact, able to survive and come out the other side? You may experience great difficulty but you’re not literally incapable of coping. It’s unpleasant but not unbearable. And remember this: it may be a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the saying goes: whether you say “I can” or whether you say “I cannot”, either way you will prove yourself right. If you believe “I can’t; it’s too much”, you may as well throw your arms up and surrender. Here’s the bad news, though: nobody is coming to rescue you. So be willing to put up a fight if you want to be emotionally resilient.

It’s very common for people to disguise this form of self-doubt by asking themselves “How will I cope?” or complaining “I don’t know what to do!” In that moment, your appraisal of your own coping ability is effectively zero. By affirming your ability to cope, though, you activate all the resources at your disposal. And trust me, nature and nurture have already given you everything you need. Every living human being has character traits, strengths, strategies, and skills, which are perfectly designed to deal with hardship and discomfort. The simplest is just acceptance. You have the capacity for patient endurance, as well as many other ways of coping. Moreover, by chunking down tasks, and simply telling yourself “I’ll take this slowly, one step at a time”, you can make even the most daunting tasks appear more manageable. Don’t turn yourself into a helpless victim. Choose to make yourself a survivor. “They can”, said Virgil, “because they believe they can.”

Damning

Self-worth is an issue for most people. That doesn’t necessarily mean that their self-esteem is already low but, perhaps more often, that it is unstable and fluctuates because it depends on achieving some external standard of success or the approval of other people. Ellis diagnosed conditional self-esteem as one of the most common problems encountered in therapy. For example, “I MUST perform better at work than anyone else, otherwise I am a worthless FAILURE.” Putting yourself down in such an extreme way can lead to shame, anger with yourself, or even depression. The drive to avoid confirming this self-damning belief is often what leads to fear and anxiety.

People often try to motivate themselves through self-flagellation, i.e., ruminative self-criticisms. They believe “I HAVE TO criticize myself for being a FAILURE in order to learn from my mistakes and to make sure I do better in the future.” I like to call this the world’s worst self-improvement strategy. It doesn’t work. You wouldn’t expect a coach or therapist to try motivating clients by calling them “WORTHLESS” and “STUPID” would you? It tends to become obvious nonsense if you imagine adopting this strategy toward someone you care about, especially a child. Calling kids “IDIOTS” or “totally INCOMPETENT” is not a well-regarded educational method. Damning people, adults or children, actually inhibits learning rather than encouraging learning. If you wouldn’t do that to other people, why would you do it to yourself?

It’s also common, particularly in anger, to end up damning other people in a similar manner. For example, “People MUST live up to my high standards, otherwise they’re just total IDIOTS” or “People HAVE TO respect me, otherwise they’re total JERKS.” I sometimes refer to self-damning or damning others as vilification. It’s a form of objectification, in which we temporarily view others as no longer fully human but rather we reduce them to a single damnable character trait or behaviour. He’s a damn LIAR! Politicians are all so damn CORRUPT! As if there’s nothing more to a person than can be subsumed under that label. But it’s never the whole story.

Ellis championed a philosophy of unconditional self and other acceptance. He believed, as the Stoics did, that the solution to this baneful human tendency is to place our common fallibility and imperfection front and centre, and accept ourselves simply as human beings. Where is the evidence that just because you strongly dislike someone’s actions that makes their whole being WORTHLESS and STUPID? Just because you did some stupid things, it doesn’t make you a fundamentally stupid person. Condemn the sin, not the sinner. By focusing on specific actions, and keeping an open mind about the person as a whole, recognizing their fallibility and complexity, and capacity for change, we can prevent ourselves from getting into the habit of vilifying ourselves and others.

Incidentally, if you’re going to damn yourself as a fundamentally STUPID or INCOMPETENT person, you’ll soon be tied up in philosophical knots. You are the one evaluating things. If you genuinely believe that you are completely STUPID and INCOMPETENT, how can you trust your own evaluation of yourself? Surely you’d be too STUPID and INCOMPETENT to know for sure how STUPID and INCOMPETENT you actually are? It’s an operational self-contradiction.

When we judge a person as a whole to be worthless or attach a global negative label to their character, we’re making what philosophers call a logical category error. Think of this analogy. If you don’t like the shows broadcast on television, you might call them STUPID or WORTHLESS. But what sense does it make to say that the television set itself is STUPID or WORTHLESS just because you don’t like the shows? The television set has played lots of different shows in the past, and will play lots more in the future. The shows it played in the past are too varied to be reduced to a single adjective. Different people may have switched channels and watched different programs on the same device. You don’t know what it will play in the future. Indeed, there’s no limit what shows can be broadcast and played on a television. It’s the same with a human being. When we slap rigid labels on people, we forget how complex they are, how they behave differently in different contexts, and that they could potentially change at any point in the future.

A table that has four legs today will probably have four legs in the future, and if you place it in another room it will still have four legs, unless we saw one off. People are alive, though, and life is a dynamic process. Someone who acts stupidly or selfishly today may not always have acted that way. They may act differently in different situations. And they could potentially change at any point in the future. So what sense does it make to call them a STUPID or SELFISH person? That’s a form of reductionism, which leads us to reify living human beings and treat them as if they were as static and inert as a mere object.

Once again, the difference may not be obvious at first. Saying that someone has acted selfishly is a world apart, psychologically speaking, though, from saying that they are nothing but a completely SELFISH person. When we want people to learn from their mistakes we get specific. We point to the individual mistakes they made, to the part of the equation they got wrong, we encourage their efforts, and praise them for the bits they got right, before helping them to correct their mistake, and pointing them toward the solution. We don’t say “Your problem is that you’re fundamentally INCOMPETENT.” That demotivates people and it’s so vague and generalized that it makes it impossible for them to know how to learn from their mistakes and correct their actions. It’s not helpful to treat other people that way. It’s even more dangerous when we do that to ourselves. The world, however, is full of people who compulsively attempt to motivate themselves through morbid self-flagellation. Get specific; criticize the behaviour not the person; and radically accept that you are fallible just like everyone else.

Conclusion

I largely agree with Ellis, and I find his way of conceptualizing irrational beliefs to be simple and pragmatic. It reminds me of a famous quote from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein:

My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense. — Philosophical Investigations, 464

We can all recognize rigid demands, awfulizing, low frustration tolerance, and damning of ourselves and others. No more: “I MUST succeed; it will be AWFUL and UNBEARABLE if I fail, and means I’m a total LOSER.” Instead: “I strongly desire to succeed but I don’t NEED to; it would be unhelpful but not AWFUL and unpleasant but not UNBEARABLE if I fail; even if I do fail that doesn’t make me a LOSER.”

After identifying these irrational beliefs, the next step in REBT is usually to actively dispute them, and to continue doing so vigorously each day. Often imagination exercises are used to progressively deepen intellectual insight until it becomes emotional insight, and starts to shape our experience. We then act contrary to our irrational beliefs, carrying out behavioural experiments, to prove to ourselves that we do better when we act “as if” we hold more flexible and adaptive beliefs. And finally, we can begin to make this the foundation of a rational philosophy of life.

PS.

Some people say “But I’m not aware of going around saying any of this stuff to myself!” Sure but we’re talking about beliefs not thoughts. Psychologists tend to refer to the fleeting events in consciousness as “thoughts” and the underlying attitudes that remain fairly constant as your “beliefs”. Let me ask you a silly question: how many beliefs do you have? (Think about it for a minute.) Too many to count, right? Do you walk about verbalizing them all in your head all the time? No. For the most part, almost all of them remain implicit or unspoken.

You could say they’re often unconscious. We’re not looking, though, for deep unconscious repression here. Most of these beliefs are pretty obvious from the way you think, act, or feel. Even if they don’t go around saying “Other people MUST approve of me, otherwise it means I’m a total FAILURE”, many people go around acting “as if” that’s precisely what they believe, because that’s how they feel, at least in certain situations. So for evidence of irrational beliefs, look at how you’re acting and feeling, when upset, rather than simply at what you say to yourself. After all, it’s primarily your feelings and actions that you probably want to change.