Emotionally Intelligent People Use the Rule of Reframing to Change Their Perspective, Think Differently, and Reduce Anxiety

Cognitive reappraisal is a way of reinterpreting a situation in order to change its emotional impact. It’s one of the most effective strategies for managing emotions. Instead of trying to suppress how you feel, you change the story behind the feeling.

The main goal of cognitive reappraisal is to shift our perspective on an event, thought or feeling, allowing us to experience a more positive emotional response. A simple way to put cognitive reappraisal into practice is to remind yourself that the thing you’re feeling so bad about probably won’t matter that much in the future. You can do this by a

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When you catch yourself catastrophising in this way, try to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. With the right toolkit, we can come to realise things aren’t as bad as they seem – and so the fear becomes less intense. The scientific name for this process is ‘cognitive reappraisal’:5 changing the interpretation of a situation so that we

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As the psychologist Tracy Dennis-Tiwary writes in her book ‘Future Tense,’ anxiety can help narrow attention and heighten focus and detail-orientation. Anxiety can be a form of caring, of our minds highlighting what matters. It tells us that achieving our goals will require effort, and it pushes us to think about what efforts, exactly, we should ta

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