Back to Course
Լight modeDark mode

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy

by David D. Burns
 
Feeling Good grew out of dissatisfaction with the conventional Freudian treatment of depression. Aaron T. Beck, David Burns’ mentor, found that there was no empirical evidence for the success of psychoanalysis in treating depressed people; in fact, the patient is generally made to feel like a loser. Freud believed that if a patient admitted to deep faults, they were probably correct!
Beck’s experience with the depressed showed a contradiction between their present opinion of themselves and their actual achievements; their protestations of “I am worthless” simply did not make sense to the observer. He concluded that depression was the result of wrong thinking. Negative or incorrect thoughts spiral a person into the full set of depressive symptoms, which then tend to compound the condition. This insight laid the basis for cognitive therapy, which gets patients to “talk themselves out of” depression, rebutting their own thoughts until they become free of distorted self-perceptions.
The research created a wave of interest that made the cognitive approach into a pillar of modern depression treatment, along with drugs and other forms of psychotherapy.
 

The Feeling Good story

David Burns was part of the team at Beck’s Center for Cognitive Therapy at the University of Pennsylvania, and Feeling Good was the popular outcome of its clinical treatment and research. Though obviously not so new now, Feeling Good is still a superb introduction to the cognitive therapy way of beating the blues, and continues to be a bestseller.
If you want a more clinical approach to personal development and mood mastery than the average self-help book, it should not disappoint (US mental health professionals rated it No. 1 out of a list of 1,000 books for self-help depression treatment). The graphs, tables, and imaginary patient–doctor scripts might be a little off-putting to some readers, but it is easy to skip over these.
Feeling Good is not simply an anti-depression manual, however. It has sold three million copies because it also trains you to sail the more mundane seas of daily mood and emotion. Just as Seligman’s classic Learned Optimism originated in research into learned helplessness, so the quest of Drs Beck and Burns to learn about the “black bile” of depression resulted in a book that shows you how to cultivate its opposite: joy, and the self-mastery that engineers it.
We look more closely below at some of the main points in the book.
 

Demystifying depression

  • Throughout the history of psychiatry, depression has been an emotional disorder. The cognitive view is that an intellectual error creates or worsens the depressive illness. Depression is one illness that we do not have to have.
  • Negative thoughts have a snowball effect. Just one can lead into a mild case of the blues, which in turn expands into a fog of general distorted perception, in which everything looks bad or lacks mean- ing. When someone is depressed their worthlessness, expressed in terms of the four “Ds” of defeated, defective, deserted, and deprived, seems to be the absolute truth. Depressed patients actually lose the ability to think clearly, and the worse the depression, the greater the distortion. When thinking is clear and has a sense of perspective, it is impossible not to have a healthy level of self-esteem and confidence.
  • Burns makes a distinction between genuine sadness and depression. The former is a part of being human, enlarges our experience of life, and brings self-knowledge. The latter suffocates us by closing our view of life’s possibilities.
 

Feelings are not facts

  • We tend to believe that our emotions reflect a self-evident truth that is beyond question. Emotions fool us into thinking that they are “right,” and bad feelings about ourselves or our abilities seem unchallengeable. We are told to “trust our feelings.” But if the thoughts feeding them are not rational, or are based on misconception or prejudice, trusting our feelings is a very risky thing to do.
  • Burns employs this analogy: “Your emotions follow your thoughts just as surely as baby ducks follow their mother. But the fact that the baby ducks follow faithfully along doesn’t prove that the mother knows where she is going.” Emotions are almost the last thing we should trust, because “feelings are not facts.”
  • Does “feeling great” prove that you are a particularly worthy per- son? If the answer is no, then feeling bad does not, logically, say anything about your true worth. “Your feelings do not determine your worth, simply your relative state of comfort or discomfort,” Burns says. Not surprisingly, he counsels never to label yourself with terms like “worthless” or “contemptible.” We are not set things that can be judged like that; each person is an evolving, flowing phenomenon that defies easy judgments. Some aspect of our behavior might be no good, but it makes no logical sense to take an opinion about our behavior and turn it into a larger judgment about our basic self.
 

How to develop a low IQ (“Irritability Quotient”)

  • The two regular approaches to anger and irritability are turning anger inward, where it corrodes from inside and leads to depression and apathy; and expression, or “letting it all out.”
  • Expression can sometimes be effective, is simplistic, and may even get you into trouble. The cognitive approach transcends both by virtually eliminating the need to deal with anger, because there is very little of it around in the first place. However, first you must have the realization that it is “hot thoughts,” rather than events, that create your anger. Even if something happens that by any normal standards is bad, you should still be able to choose your response, rather than being prey to automatic or uncontrollable reactions. If you are angry, it is because you have chosen to be.
  • Would you like to overcome your fear of criticism? Even more, to be able to talk back when criticized, in a cool, non-defensive way? This ability would have a tremendous impact on your self-perception. Criticism may be right or wrong, or somewhere in between, but one way to find out clearly is to ask the critic questions. Be specific, even if what was said was harsh and personal. This will reveal either the truth in what has been said, giving you the opportunity to rectify your behavior, or that the person is talking out of anger, in which case you will know that the criticism was an expression of their own frustration rather than a real criticism of you. Either way, there is no need for a negative emotional reaction on your part. You are left in the position where you can either use the criticism or dismiss it and get on with things. You also defuse the wrath of the critic.
  • Much anger is defensiveness against loss of self-esteem. However, by learning to control your angry feelings your self-esteem stays on an even keel, as you refuse to turn every situation into an emotional one. As Burns says: “You rarely need your anger in order to be human.” Controlling your feelings does not turn you into a robot, but on the contrary gives you vastly more energy for living life and enjoying it.
 

Rest of the book

  • There are excellent chapters on guilt, overcoming the “approval addiction” and the “love addiction,” work (“Your work is not your worth”),the value of aiming low (“Dare to be average! Ways to overcome perfectionism”),and “How to beat ‘do-nothingism.’”
  • Perhaps surprisingly, the book’s last chapter looks at the chemical treatment of depression (for example Prozac). Used simultaneously with cognitive therapy, drugs often work because they enable a per- son to think more rationally, and from that base cognitive therapy is likely to have more effect.
 

Final comments

You may believe that mood swings and self-defeating behavior are a natural part of being human. The amazing thing about Feeling Good is that it not only shatters this myth but shows how easily they can be prevented by deploying simple but effective principles and techniques. Most depression is usually only a case of having fallen into a rut and having forgotten the original purpose trigger. Where before you may have thought “These are important deep feelings I have to deal with,” now you can see them for what they really are: a waste of your time.
Emotional mastery is not about turning yourself into a robot, but about increasing your humanity. The significance of Feeling Good is that it blazed a trail for successful titles like Emotional Intelligence and Learned Optimism, which have collectively attempted to reinstall reason as the monarch that unites and rules over emotional territory.
 

David D. Burns

Burns attended Amherst College and received his MD from Stanford University. He completed his psychiatric training at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was Acting Chief of Psychiatry of the Medical Center. He has been a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Medical School and Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he received a “Teacher of the Year” award from graduating residents in 1998. He lectures to professional groups around the world.
As well as the successful spin-off Feeling Good Handbook, Burns has published Love Is Never Enough on relationships and Ten Days to Self-Esteem.
The power of thought >Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy
Course content