Don't Believe Everything You ThinkUzorak

In 2021, the US Surgeon General declared that teens are in a mental health epidemic, and not a lot has changed in the years since. The most recent large national survey found that more than 1 in 3 students were experiencing persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. Smaller, more recent studies have concluded that 33.7% of young adults 18-to-25 are experiencing mental health issues—a higher percentage than any other generation.

Many factors contribute to this epidemic, but one that’s often been overlooked is the health of our thinking.

Not all thoughts are created equal. Some thoughts are healthy because they align with the world as it really is. (In a word: reality.) Other thoughts and patterns of thinking are unhealthy, and are considered “cognitive distortions.”

These distortions can bend and blur reality in ways that harm our perception of risk, degrade our self-esteem, magnify our fears, and make us suspicious of others—among many other things.

In this short devotional series, we want to help you apply biblical wisdom to seven of the most common cognitive distortions:

1. Emotional reasoning
2. Catastrophizing
3. Overgeneralizing
4. Black-and-white thinking
5. Mind reading
6. Negative filtering
7. Blaming

Today, we'll tackle "emotional reasoning."

As you might expect, emotional reasoning involves allowing our feelings to completely take over our reasoning, or our interpretation of reality. Someone experiencing this distortion might think thoughts like, “I feel depressed—therefore, I don’t belong in my friend group.”

In this example, the assumption is that the feeling of depression must mean something ominous about the quality of this person’s relationships. But in reality, a feeling of depression or sadness could come from any number of things—like maybe this hypothetical person has been sitting in a dark room for 18 hours eating unhealthy food.

In today's scripture passage, David describes feeling forgotten and forsaken by God. In verses 9 and 10 he writes, “I say to God my Rock, ‘Why have you forgotten me? Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy?’ My bones suffer mortal agony as my foes taunt me, saying to me all day long, ‘Where is your God?’” In other words, David doesn’t try to ignore his feelings of pain and desolation; he gives full voice to them.

But he doesn’t allow his feelings to control his thinking. The psalm ends with David writing to himself in verse 11, reminding himself of what he knows to be true, regardless of how he feels: “Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”

Just because it feels like something is true doesn't mean that it's actually true. Learning to think clearly involves recognizing when our interpretation of reality is being completely controlled by the emotions we are experiencing, and reminding ourselves of what we know to be true.

As C.S. Lewis once put it in his Letters to Malcolm, “Don’t bother much about your feelings. When they are humble, loving, brave, give thanks for them; when they are conceited, selfish, cowardly, ask to have them altered. In neither case are they you, but only a thing that happens to you. What matters is your intentions and your behavior.” When we begin to believe that our feelings are more than just our personal response to things happening outside of us, we are at risk of falling into this cognitive distortion.