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Four Easy Gratitude Exercises . . . And One Hard One

Four Easy Gratitude Exercises . . . And One Hard One

Gratitude is the feeling appreciation for someone or something. When we feel gratitude, we recognizing the good in the world that exists outside of ourselves. This article contains four gratitude exercises that are designed to cultivate gratitude in our daily lives. When we express gratitude, we may think the recipient our gratitude to be the…

Emotional Reasoning: When the Mind Mistakes Feeling for Fact

Emotional Reasoning: When the Mind Mistakes Feeling for Fact

Emotional reasoning is a cognitive distortion, or faulty pattern of thought, in which a person believes that his or her own emotional experience in relation to a thought is evidence of the truthfulness of that thought. In a nutshell, emotional reasoning occurs when we think the following: I feel it’s true, so it must be true. Like…

All or Nothing Thinking: The Limited World of Black and White

All or Nothing Thinking: The Limited World of Black and White

All or nothing thinking (also known as black and white thinking) is a cognitive distortion that causes a person to see something as all good or all bad, with no in-between. This is is one of the most common cognitive distortions, and also one of the most damaging. Examples of all or nothing thinking When…

Sir John Falstaff: Wisdom is Found in Strange Places

Sir John Falstaff: Wisdom is Found in Strange Places

Ah, Sir John Falstaff. He’s Shakespeare’s low-living, gluttonous, perpetually indebted senior citizen, who steals for a living, meets all outward criteria of alcohol dependency, and is called a coward by his closest friends the first time we meet him. This is charge only amplified when he plays dead in battle and then falsely claims he…