A Guide to Rational Living

Albert Ellis has been recognized as one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century (#2, in fact, right ahead of Freud and behind Carl Rogers). Ellis was, essentially, the founder of the modern cognitive behavioral movement and in this Note we’ll have fun exploring some Big Ideas on how to get our minds right—from understanding the roots of neurosis, the ABC’s of suffering, and the importance of action, you’ll feel inspired and empowered by the end!

Big Ideas

The Roots of Neurosis
Distorted thinking.
The ABC’s of Suffering
Action -> Belief -> Consequences.
A Frantic Search
For perfection is not a good idea.
Negative Emotions
Healthy vs. unhealthy.
Think AND Act
Pretty, please.
Make the Plunge!
Live experimentally.
Difficult
Does not mean impossible.
The Essence of Neurosis
Is blame.
Accept Yourself.
Judge your acts but not yourself.
Get Into Flow
Now’s a good time for that.

“Thus, you may reduce your depression by using drugs or relaxation techniques. But unless you begin to think more clearly and surrender some of your Irrational Beliefs, you will tend to depress yourself again when you stop the drugs and exercises. To effect permanent and deep-seated improvements, philosophic changes seem to be best.

Again, we often encourage our clients to use medication, relaxation techniques, movement therapy, yoga exercises, or other physical approaches. We believe that these techniques may help. And we teach, as we shall show later, many emotive, dramatic, fantasy, self-management, and behavior modification methods. More than most other schools of therapy, REBT [Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy] employs a comprehensive, integrative approach to treatment.

We still hold, however, that if you would most thoroughly and permanently change your disturbed feelings, you’d better use considerable reasoning. Because a large element (though not the whole) of destructive emotion stems from unrealistic, illogical, and self-sabotaging thinking.”

~ Albert Ellis & Robert A. Harper from A Guide to Rational Living

Well, that’s officially the longest intro quote I think we’ve had in these Notes and this is #114. But it captures the essence of A Guide to Rational Living quite well so we’ll stick with it. :)

Albert Ellis, the co-author of this straight-talking book all about getting our thoughts in order so we can live happier, more fulfilled lives, was one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century. In fact, he’s been ranked as the #2 top psychologist ever—right behind Carl Rogers (see Notes on On Becoming a Person) and ahead of Sigmund Freud.

He’s essentially the founder of the modern cognitive behavioral therapy movement that’s been scientifically proven to be one of the most powerful ways to help people get out of a funk and this book is a no-nonsense, kinda old-school guide to rockin’ it.

It’s packed with Big Ideas so let’s jump in!

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Can we really change such well-practiced mental attitudes? Definitely. Will it be easy? No—but those who diligently work with the cognitive, emotive, and behavioral “tools” of REBT have an excellent chance of success.

Albert Ellis & Robert A. Harper

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The Roots of Neurosis: Distorted Thinking

“A discussion of the roots of neurosis is mainly a discussion of distorted thinking. From the point of view of mind/brain as computer, most human beings are innately poor programmers. They seldom succeed in setting themselves up to get along very happily in an imperfect world. Neurotics are especially bad at it. Although irrational behavior is sometimes due to faulty “hardware,” such as neurological impairment, it is also due to faulty “software,” to self-created, self-defeating Irrational Beliefs.”

This book is all about challenging our “Irrational Beliefs” and re-programming our software.

So, how about a couple more computer metaphors? :)

T. Harv Eker strikes a similar theme in his Secrets of the Millionaire Mind (see Notes): “Your programming leads to your thoughts; your thoughts lead to your feelings; your feelings lead to your actions; your actions lead to your results. Therefore, just as is done with a personal computer, by changing your programming, you take the first essential step to changing your results.”

While Will Bowen says this in his great little book A Complaint Free World (see Notes): “Less pain, better health, satisfying relationships, a better job, being more serene and joyous … sound good? It’s not only possible, it’s probable. Consciously striving to reformat your mental hard drive is not easy, but you can start now and in a short period of time—time that will pass anyway—you can have the life you’ve always dreamed of having.”

The ABC’s of Suffering

“The mechanism of such an emotional disturbance is not difficult to grasp. It looks, at first blush, as though it’s just a matter of “stimulus” and “response”—as if something unfortunate happens to people (the stimulus), and that, by itself, causes them to get upset (the response). But it looks that way only because, when something unfortunate happens, the key element of emotional arousal—their irrational thinking—leaps into action almost instantaneously and, of course, largely out of sight.

The actual mechanism of an emotional disturbance is a stimulus-belief-response, or as we say in REBT: “Action-Belief-Consequence.” These are the terms behind REBT’s well-known ABC model of emotional arousal. Bottom line: it’s not our life events (Actions) that, themselves, directly disturb us (produce unpleasant emotional Consequences). It’s our irrational demandingness, our shoulds, oughts, and musts (Beliefs), that largely do the job.”

Well, there ya go. Those are the ABC’s of suffering. :)

“Action -> Belief -> Consequence”

Something happens (Action). We respond a certain way because of our conscious and unconscious Beliefs. Then we experience the resulting emotions (Consequences).

As much as we try to be a victim to our circumstances, it’s never: “Action -> Consequence”

As you know, we talk about this all the time. And we have Albert Ellis and his passionate commitment to getting these ideas into mainstream psychology (and therefore into pop psychology) to thank for it.

In short: The key is to become more aware of what thoughts/beliefs we have when we’re stressed. We need to practice identifying and challenging them—seeing if we can come up with more empowering responses. And, in the process, we learn how to step in between the stimulus and normal response so we can choose our most empowered response.

THAT, my friends, is pretty much what Optimism is all about.

I really like the way Sonja Lyubomirsky describes it in The How of Happiness (see Notes): “Write down your barrier thoughts, and then consider ways to reinterpret the situation. In the process, ask yourself questions like… What else could this situation or experience mean? Can anything good come from it? Does it present any opportunities for me? What lessons can I learn and apply to the future? Did I develop any strengths as a result?”

And she says this: “Essentially, all optimism strategies involve the exercise of construing the world with a more positive and charitable perspective, and many entail considering the silver lining in the cloud, identifying the door that opens as a result of one that has closed. It takes hard work and a great deal of practice to accomplish effectively, but if you can persist at these strategies until they become habitual, the benefits could be immense. Some optimists may be born that way, but scores of optimists are made with practice.”

Fun!

A Frantic Search For Perfection

“Let us emphasize that we do not believe that any human can, for any length of time, feel perfectly or completely happy. Your frantic search for a perfect anything, in fact, almost dooms you to misery. You aren’t the kind of animal that achieves perfection in virtually anything—especially perfect happiness. Because of your ever-changing experiences, you are subject to hundreds of irritations, pains, ills, diseases, and stresses. So you can overcome many of your physical and emotional handicaps, as we show in this book. But not all.”

Here’s another liberating theme we come back to again and again: There are no perfect human beings!! And you’re not going to be the first!! :)

So, relax. Or, at least chill out a bit. And know that our frantic search for a perfect anything almost dooms us to misery!

Dan Millman puts it well in Everyday Enlightenment (see Notes): “No one feels the same way all the time. Even if you are angry, depressed, crazy, afraid, or grieving, you’ll have moments when you are distracted. There are no enlightened people, no nice, bad, smart, neurotic, or stupid people, either—only people with more (or less) enlightened, nice, bad, smart, neurotic, or stupid moments.”

And Tal Ben-Shahar wrote a GREAT book all about it called The Pursuit of Perfect (see Notes) where he advises us to become an Optimalist rather than a Perfectionist. How? Well, the Biggest Idea is to simply realize that we’ll NEVER attain perfection and, working within that constraint, we can then have fun “optimalizing” and see if we can create the best possible life rather than the perfect one. :)

Healthy vs. Unhealthy Negative Emotions

“Misery, in other words, consists of two fairly distinct parts: (1) desiring, wishing, or preferring that you achieve some goal or purpose and feeling disappointed and irritated when you do not achieve it; and (2) demanding, insisting, commanding, and necessitating that you achieve your goal or purpose and making yourself feel bitter, enraged, panicked, despairing, and self-drowning when you do not.

In REBT, we distinguish between healthy feelings of sorrow or irritation when you lose something you desire; and unhealthy feelings of depression or rage stemming from your refusal to accept frustrations, and from your whining that they absolutely must not exist. If you think rationally (self-helpingly), you will feel greatly disappointed or sad about the loss of a person you care for. But you need not also feel utterly overwhelmed and depressed about the same loss. You may sanely choose to feel strongly annoyed or irritated by frustrating conditions. But you need not make yourself feel very enraged or self-pitying about these defeats.

While your feelings of loss or grief are healthy reactions to distinct loss, your feelings of panic or depression are not.”

Good stuff.

So, we all have negative things that happen to us in our lives. It’s natural and healthy to experience a certain amount of frustration/grief/pain when we encounter these challenges.

But, when we move beyond a certain level of “Gah!”-ness into an extended period of overwhelming grief/depression/panic, we’ve gotta look at how we’re interpreting the event.

What we’ll inevitably find when (or should I say “IF!”) we look is an irrational belief.

Namely, we’re telling ourselves that whatever’s happening (whether it’s the car breaking down, our spouse breaking down or the economy breaking down) should NOT be happening.

And, well, arguing with reality like that is a one-way ticket to suffering.

As Byron Katie so brilliantly says in her great book Loving What Is (see Notes): “I realized that it’s insane to oppose it. When I argue with reality, I lose—but only 100% of the time.”

So, if you’re feeling angst because you lost your job or your health or even a loved one, check in and see if you’ve moved beyond the realm of healthy negative emotion into the realm of pure Victim where you’re whining about how what’s going on absolutely must not exist.

Then get back to our ABC’s of rockin’ it and choose a better Belief/thought/response, yo!!

You’d Better Think and Act

“To modify your destructive habits, you’d better think and act. Deliberately work against the influence of the past; force yourself, for example to act toward your father in a more adult fashion, to risk his disapproval, to say and do things that you previously would have been panicked to do. If you never in all your life talked to a stranger on a bus, went to a party alone, kissed a partner on your first date, or did similar things that you would like to do, force yourself until you keep trying these terrible “fearful” acts. No nonsense! Don’t just think: act! You can overcome years of past anguish and inertia by days or weeks of forced practice today.”

This is where the “Behavioral” in Rational Emotive BEHAVIORAL Therapy and Cognitive BEHAVIORAL Therapy comes in.

It’s not enough to just THINK about these ideas and transform our thoughts. We need to ACT in line with our new beliefs.

In fact, as Ellis and Harper tell us, we need to FORCE ourselves to move through our fears if we want to create a new way of being.

Powerful stuff. So… Uh, what might you want to work on in this regard? :)

Make The Plunge!

“In the final analysis, however, you’d better make some kind of plunge. Make this plunge experimentally, with the full knowledge that it may work out well—and it may not. If you fail, it will be unfortunate, but rarely catastrophic. And failure doesn’t have anything to do with your intrinsic value as a person. Humans mainly learn by doing and by failing—a fact that you can, without liking it, gratefully accept.”

I. Love. That. For so many reasons.

First, love the practice of taking the plunge and seeing our life as one big experiment. Maslow and Emerson come to mind here.

In Motivation and Personality (see Notes) Abraham Maslow tells us: “It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.”

While Ralph Waldo Emerson tells us: “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”

There’s something SO liberating about seeing our lives as an experiment. It’s an incredibly cool way to tame the perfectionist gremlin and give ourselves room to really explore and, for me anyway, ENJOY life a lot more!

Back to you: What can you approach with a little more experimental energy?!

Difficult Does Not Mean Impossible

“Difficult, however, does not mean impossible. Of course, you will find it hard to think and to act rationally in an irrational world. Of course you will have trouble reasoning your way out of circumstances which have handicapped you for many years. All right, it is difficult. But it is also difficult for a blind man to learn to read Braille, a victim of polio to use his muscles again, or a normal person to swing from a trapeze, learn ballet dancing, or play the piano well. Tough! But they—and you—still can do it.”

Ah. Love that!

“Difficult, however, does not mean impossible.”

Marcus Aurelius echoes this sentiment (or perhaps they echo him :) in this classic wisdom from Meditations (see Notes): “Because a thing is difficult for you, do not therefore suppose it beyond mortal power. On the contrary, if anything is possible and proper for a man to do, assume that it must fall within your own capacity.”

Is there anything in your life that’s difficult, perhaps even very difficult that you’re convincing yourself is impossible?

Check in on that.

And change your perception if you need to.

Difficult does not mean impossible.

The Essence of Neurosis

“We can actually put the essence of neurosis in a single word: blaming—or damning. If you would stop, really stop, damning yourself, others, and unkind conditions, you would find it almost impossible to upset yourself emotionally—about anything. Yes, anything.”

Love that one, too. :)

And, as it turns out, Note #113 on A Complaint Free World was all about this exact theme.

Check it out for more goodness.

For now, we’ll let Maya Angelou do the honors: “If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude. Don’t complain.”

Accept Yourself

“Yes, you acted poorly, and will keep getting unfortunate results if you continue to act that way. But don’t, under any conditions, put down yourself, your entire personhood, for making such errors. Don’t blame or devil-ify yourself in any way, no matter how many times you err. Your acts may be foolish or immoral, but you cannot justifiably be damned or downed, or devil-ified for performing them.”

That’s a *really* Big Idea.

Step back. Notice your behaviors that aren’t producing the results you’d like. Take more constructive action. But always accept your whole self. Period.

Get Into Flow

“People rarely feel particularly happy or alive when inactive except for short periods of time between their exertions. Although they may get tired and tense when continuously on the go, they are easily bored and listless when they constantly rest. Passive “enjoyments,” such as reading, play-going, or watching sporting events, are often entertaining and relaxing. But a steady diet of this kind of “activity” often leads to dullness and apathy.

Intelligent people tend to require vitally absorbing activity to stay most alive and happy. They rarely are enthusiastic for any length of time unless they have some rather complex, absorbing, and challenging occupations or interests.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi basically wrote an entire book on this subject called Flow. Check out the Notes for the full low-down but know this: A lifetime of drinks with pink umbrellas on the beach will NOT lead to happiness. Nor will zoning out on Facebook or in front of the TV.

We need something that fires us up.

As Sonja Lyubomirsky puts it in The How of Happiness (see Notes): “In 1932, weighed down by the sorrows and agonies of his self-absorbed and aimless clients, an Australian psychiatrist named W. Béran Wolfe summed up his philosophy like this: ‘If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert.’ He was right. People who strive for something personally significant, whether it’s learning a new craft, changing careers, or raising moral children, are far happier than those who don’t have strong dreams or aspirations. Find a happy person, and you will find a project.”