Emotional reasoning
Emotional reasoning is treating a feeling as proof: I feel scared, so this must be dangerous. I feel guilty, so I must have done something wrong. The feeling is real and worth listening to. It tells you about you, and not always about the situation.
- Also called: Ex-consequentia reasoning in research, summed up as "if I feel anxious, there must be danger".
- Listen for: "I feel like...", "It just feels true", "I know it, I can feel it".
- Close relative: Catastrophizing, which supplies the dread that emotional reasoning then counts as evidence.
- One question to ask: What would I conclude from the facts alone, if I felt calm?
The turbulence on the flight
The plane drops a few feet, your stomach goes with it, and the thought arrives fully formed: something is wrong with this plane. Nothing in the cabin has changed. The crew are still pouring coffee.
The only evidence for danger is the fear.
David Burns described the pattern as assuming your negative emotions reflect the way things are: "I feel it, therefore it must be true."1
- Anxious: I feel scared on this flight, so something must be wrong with the plane.
- Guilty: I feel guilty for saying no, so saying no must have been wrong.
- Stuck: I feel like nothing will change, so nothing will.
- Jealous: I feel jealous, so she must be hiding something.
Same story, with and without the fear
Arnoud Arntz and colleagues wrote short scenarios that were either objectively safe or objectively dangerous, and in some versions they added one detail: the person in the story felt anxious.2
People with anxiety disorders rated a scenario as more dangerous when the anxious feeling was in it.2 The facts were identical.
People without anxiety disorders went by the facts.2
The effect wasn't limited to each person's own fear, and it showed up across spider phobia, panic and social anxiety.2 It looked less like a quirk of one phobia and more like a general way people with anxiety disorders read danger: if I feel it, it's there.
The word in the middle
Made-up examples, from homes, bodies and families:
"I feel unloved tonight, so he must not care about me anymore."
"I feel awful, so whatever this is must be serious."
"I feel useless when I ask my parents for help, so I must be useless."
"I feel overwhelmed, so the house must be a total disaster."
"I feel completely out of my depth in this job. I must be bad at it."
The giveaway is "so". A feeling on one side, a fact about the world on the other, and nothing in between.
Once the feeling has spoken, the mind often goes looking for proof that matches it, and finds some easily. Then the feeling fades, and the same situation can look quite different by morning, which leaves you wondering which view was right.
Why fear feels like seeing
Fear doesn't feel like having an emotion. It feels like noticing danger.
That's useful when the danger is real. When a thought sets the alarm off, it misleads.
It can also feed itself. Iris Engelhard and Arnoud Arntz describe a loop: fear is taken as a sign of coming disaster, which raises distress, which is then taken as more proof.3 False alarms aren't recognized as false, so the belief stays in place, and they found the same kind of reasoning in people with PTSD.3
When the gut is right
None of this is a case for ignoring feelings. A gut feeling can point to something worth checking, like the unease you feel around one particular person at a party, or the sense that a deal that sounded fine on the phone is off somehow when you read the contract.
The difference is what happens next. Trusting your gut means using the feeling as a reason to look closer. Emotional reasoning skips the looking and treats the feeling as the answer.
Two lines, then the facts
- Write the feeling and the conclusion on separate lines. "I feel guilty." Then: "I'm concluding that I did something wrong." Seeing them apart makes the jump visible.
- Ask what the facts say on their own. What happened, as a camera would record it? Would a calm friend reach the same conclusion from those facts?
- Rate how sure you are now, and again tomorrow. If belief in the conclusion drops as the feeling drops, the feeling was doing much of the work.
- Test it. If the thought is "I feel anxious, so this dinner will go badly", go to the dinner and note what happened. A behavioral experiment changed belief in a negative thought faster than a thought record in one study, though both helped.4
- Date the prediction. For a worry about the future, write the feared outcome and when you'll know, then check, the way the worry time page describes.
The thought record asks for the feeling and the thought in separate steps, which is the split this pattern needs. You can compare it with the other nine patterns on the cognitive distortions page.
When the alarm won't switch off
If fear keeps you from flying, driving, leaving the house or going to the doctor, or the false alarms come as panic attacks, bring it to your doctor or a CBT therapist.
Finish this sentence about something from this week: "I felt ___, so I decided ___." Then write what you would have decided from the facts alone.
Answer this with JoyQuestions people ask about emotional reasoning
What is an example of emotional reasoning?
Feeling nervous before a flight and concluding the flight is unsafe. Or feeling like a fraud and deciding you must be one, despite good feedback. The feeling becomes the evidence.
How does emotional reasoning show up in relationships?
Often as jealousy or feeling unloved being read as proof: "I feel insecure, so he must be pulling away." Writing down what happened, apart from the feeling, gives you something to talk about with your partner instead of a verdict.
Is emotional reasoning a sign of an anxiety disorder?
In the Arntz study it showed up in people with anxiety disorders and not in the comparison group.2 That was a comparison of groups, though. One feeling-led conclusion on a bad night says nothing about a disorder.
Related
- Thinking patterns: the full section, from automatic thoughts to worry time.
- Catastrophizing: the worst-case story that comes with the dread.
- Should statements: where guilt about breaking a rule comes from.
- Thought record: separate feeling from thought on your phone.