The key ideas

Feeling Good

David Burns, 1980

Why does the same event ruin one person’s day and barely affect another? Psychiatrist David Burns shows how moods arise from thoughts, and how those thoughts are often distorted by the same recurring errors. You will discover ten of these errors, learn to challenge them on paper, and understand where to start when you have no energy for anything.

Who it is for

For anyone whose entire evening can be ruined by a single remark. And for anyone who puts things off while waiting to feel like doing them and judges themselves more harshly than anyone else.

You feel the way you do right now because of the thoughts you are thinking at this moment.

The evening one remark ruined

Imagine an ordinary evening. During the day, a colleague remarked in passing that your report could have been more carefully prepared. Nothing terrible happened, but by nightfall your mood has hit rock bottom: you keep thinking that you get everything wrong and always will. It seems as though the remark itself ruined your evening.

American psychiatrist David Burns spent many years working with people who had depression and reached a conclusion that initially sounds strange. What ruined the evening was not the remark, but what you told yourself afterward. The book is based on an approach developed by Aaron Beck: cognitive therapy. It looks for the source of low mood in a person’s thoughts and teaches them to test those thoughts.

In 1980, Burns wrote this book so people could learn the approach on their own, with a sheet of paper and a pen. His central idea is simple: moods arise from thoughts, and thoughts can be caught, written down, and checked, just as you would check a dubious rumor before believing it. The book includes forms to fill out and conversations between Burns and his patients that show how this works in practice.

Six chapters lie ahead. You will discover why a strong feeling does not prove a thought is right, which ten thinking errors Burns found in his patients again and again, how three columns on paper work, and where to begin when you have no energy for anything. You will also learn why a person’s worth does not depend on praise, love, or flawless work. The book does not promise that sadness will disappear forever. It offers a way to stop treating every bleak thought as the truth. Let us begin with where moods come from.

Feelings follow thoughts like ducklings following their mother

Imagine that someone close to you does not reply to your message all day. You might think, “They’re upset with me,” and feel anxious and resentful by evening. Or you might think, “They’re swamped at work,” and feel nothing in particular. The event is the same. Only the thoughts differ, and they determine how your evening turns out. Livria invented this example, but it illustrates Burns’s central idea.

Burns writes that you feel the way you do right now because of the thoughts you are thinking at this moment. Before becoming a feeling, an event passes through an interpretation: what it means, what it says about me, how it will end. This interpretation takes a fraction of a second. These are automatic thoughts: they arise on their own, sound obviously true, and we barely notice that we have thought anything at all.

Burns goes further, arguing that depression, as he understands it, is not a disorder of feelings at all. In his view, distressing feelings are the consequence of a stream of bleak, distorted thoughts. This is the author’s model, not a universally accepted law, but it leads to a practical conclusion: if thoughts are the cause, thoughts are where change should begin.

Burns does not, however, consider every instance of sadness an error. In his view, sadness after a genuine loss is natural: it arises from a real event, does not distort it, and passes with time. The method serves a different purpose: addressing suffering that persists because it is sustained by distorted thoughts.

The most insidious trap is that a strong feeling seems like proof. “I feel so ashamed, so there really must be something wrong with me.” Burns named this logic emotional reasoning. The feeling merely repeats the thought that caused it; it does not test that thought. Feelings are not facts, Burns writes, and if a thought was distorted, the feeling will be too.

What follows in practice? When your mood suddenly drops, stop and ask yourself: what am I telling myself right now? Write the thought down word for word, just as it sounded, including every “never” and “always.” While a thought stays inside your head, it seems like the voice of truth. On paper, you can examine it from the outside; the next chapters will show you what to do with it.

Read in Livria

About the author

David Burns is an American psychiatrist and adjunct clinical professor emeritus at Stanford University School of Medicine. Stanford psychiatry residents named him Teacher of the Year three times.

All books by this author: David Burns

Terms from the book

  • Procrastination
  • Depression
  • Self-esteem
  • Beck
  • Cognitive therapy
  • Perfectionism
  • Emotional reasoning
  • Personalization
  • Automatic thoughts: Quick interpretations that arise spontaneously in response to an event and seem obviously true. They are central to Burns’s method.
  • Cognitive distortions: Common thinking errors that make a situation look bleaker than it is. Burns described ten such errors.
  • Overgeneralization: A distortion in which a single setback looks like an endless chain of defeats: “always,” “never,” “this keeps happening to me.”
  • Mental filter: A distortion in which you pick out one unpleasant detail and see the whole situation through it.
  • Should statements: Rigid internal rules containing words such as “should,” “must,” and “must not.” According to Burns, directed at yourself they produce guilt; directed at others, irritation.
  • Triple-column technique: A tool from Burns’s book: write down an automatic thought, identify its distortion, and write a truthful response.
  • Rational response: The third column in Burns’s technique: a realistic thought that answers a distorted one. It must convince the person writing it, or it will not help.
  • Daily Record of Dysfunctional Thoughts: An expanded version of the triple-column technique that adds the situation, feelings, and their percentage intensity before and after the response. Dysfunctional thoughts are thoughts that get in the way of living.
  • Do-nothingism: Burns’s word for being stuck in inactivity: the less you do, the worse you feel.
  • Antiprocrastination Sheet: Burns’s tool for breaking a task into steps, predicting the difficulty and satisfaction of each as percentages, and then comparing those predictions with what actually happened.
  • Approval addiction: Burns’s term for the belief that a person’s worth depends on whether others approve of them. This is an image from the book, not a diagnosis.
  • Disarming technique: Burns’s approach to responding to criticism: find what is true in it and agree with that before arguing.
  • Love addiction: Burns’s term for the belief that a person cannot be happy without love and a partner. This is an image from the book, not a diagnosis.
  • Pleasure-Predicting Sheet: Burns’s tool for rating expected pleasure from activities, both with others and alone, from zero to one hundred, then recording how much pleasure you actually experienced.
  • Cost-benefit analysis: Burns’s tool for listing the advantages and disadvantages of a belief or habit, then dividing one hundred points between them to decide whether it is worth keeping.

All terms

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