Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy
David D. Burns · 1980
Psychiatrist David Burns turns Aaron Beck's cognitive therapy into a self-help toolkit: your moods are created by your thoughts, not your circumstances, and when you catch the distortions in that thinking, you can change how you feel, starting with pen and paper.
The book that put cognitive behavioral therapy into everyday hands, showing that changing how you think can lift depression, anxiety, and self-doubt without a couch or a prescription.
Two of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of Feeling Good pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.
- You feel the way you think. An upsetting event doesn't cause your emotion directly; the automatic thought you have about it does. Change the cognition and the feeling follows, which is why the distorted thoughts driving depression and anxiety can feel so utterly convincing even when they are simply false.
- Nearly every painful mood rests on one of ten cognitive distortions, all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, the mental filter, disqualifying the positive, jumping to conclusions, magnification, emotional reasoning, should statements, labeling, and personalization. Learning to name them is half the cure.
The other 5 — and the full 11-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 8 chapters
The whole summary runs about 11 minutes, read or listened to.
- You Feel the Way You Think
- The Ten Cognitive Distortions
- Measuring Your Mood and the Myth of Worthlessness
- The Triple Column Technique
- Do-Nothingism: Beating Procrastination and Paralysis
- The Approval and Love Addictions
- Perfectionism and the Tyranny of the Shoulds
- Anger, Criticism, and the Art of Talking Back
Finish Feeling Good tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 11 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
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