How to Cope With Negative Life Events: The Power of Cognitive Reappraisal
It’s your best friend’s birthday in two days and you haven’t yet bought a birthday present for her. So you head straight out the door and walk 20 minutes to the nearest gift shop only to find that the shop is closed. You’re frustrated, disappointed and angry. What do you do?
Ideally, you walk back home, enjoying the cool breeze and fresh air, and tell yourself that at least you got out of the house and got 40 minutes of exercise in fresh air. Besides, you still have another day to buy something for her!
Now you are no longer frustrated, disappointed or angry.
This is called Cognitive Reappraisal.
What is Cognitive Reappraisal?
Cognitive Reappraisal is an emotion regulation strategy that involves reinterpreting or reevaluating a negative situation or event and reframing it to change our emotional response to that situation and reduce the negative impact it could have on our mental health.
In other words, we have the power to change our negative emotions to positive or fight negativity with positivity by changing the way we think. By doing so, even extremely painful and traumatic events such as divorce, death or miscarriage can become less painful and more tolerable. All negative events in our life have a silver lining; we just need to find it. When we change the way we think, challenges become opportunities, mistakes become lessons and failure becomes a stepping stone for success.
Cognitive Reappraisal is the key to resilience i.e. when we change the way we think about a negative or painful event, we are able to bounce back to our normal mental and emotional state more quickly and easily. Research has shown that reappraisal increases happiness and resilience and reduces negative emotions and stress
Positive and Negative Reappraisal
There are two types of reappraisal: positive and negative. Positive reappraisal refers to reframing a negative event as more positive. According to Nikki Williamson:
Positive reappraisal is an adaptive strategy — one where you take adversity and spin it so it becomes a source of challenge or inspiration, an opportunity for growth, change and success.
Negative reappraisal refers to reframing a negative event as less negative, which involves thinking of worse things that could have possibly happened but didn’t, making the actual event seem less negative in comparison.
Let me explain with the help of a real life example.
Suppose you have extreme public speaking and stage anxiety and can literally faint on the stage. Then comes the day when you have to present your research in front of an audience of about 100 people. Due to the stage fright, you stammer and stutter a lot, make a lot of weird pauses in your speech, mispronounce many words and look visibly anxious and sweaty. You manage to complete the presentation, but this experience leaves you feeling exhausted, mortified and like a failure.
Now, to change your emotional response to this negative situation and reduce the impact this event could have on your mental health, you could positively reappraise the situation and tell yourself that you had the courage to face that big of an audience, which is commendable, and managed to complete the presentation without fainting or running off the stage. So this experience was a success, not a failure. You could also identify areas of improvement and learn lessons like next time you should spend more time practicing your presentation, ideally in front of a small audience. You could even decide to learn some breathing and relaxation techniques to relax and calm down before your presentation.
Negative appraisal of the same event could mean telling yourself that your presentation was probably not as bad as you think it was. Nobody could see you trembling or sweating because of the distance between the podium and the audience. And that some of the other presenters performed worse than you. And that at least you didn’t faint or run off the stage in panic.
Let’s take another example, a more life-changing event this time.
Imagine you get divorced within 3 years of marriage.
Originally published at https://secondquadrantliving.com.
