142 Don’t Let A nxiety Run Your Life
How Cognitive Biases Darken Your
Emotional Experiences
Your cognitions, or your thoughts, are closely linked to your
emotions. Indeed, theories on the relationship between
thoughts and emotions suggest that the way you think about
a particular situation determines not only whether you expe-
rience an emotion but also the type of emotion you experi-
ence. Cognitions, therefore, are the principal pathways
through which you can both understand and regulate your
emotional experiences.
For example, if you tend to be nervous about social inter-
actions, you may be prone to think that you are not socially
skilled. As a consequence, you may feel lonely due to your
reluctance to attend social gatherings. Each time you have a
negative thought about your social abilities, it will likely
trigger a range of emotional experiences, including anxiety
about future social interactions and possibly sadness about
your loneliness. If you wanted to better regulate your emo-
tions so that you felt more confident in social situations, you
would likely benefit from reappraising your initial thought.
One of the more common questions we receive from
people who have anxiety is why they experience negative or
irrational thoughts. Although there’s not a single straight-
forward answer, especially because the content of each indi-
vidual’s thoughts is highly variable, it’s generally accepted
that negative and irrational thoughts often arise from the
ways in which people relate to and interpret their environ-
ment. Ordinarily, this shouldn’t be a problem. Sometimes,
however, the volume of information that individuals, espe-
cially anxious individuals, have to make sense of and process
is too much to handle. Although the human brain is remark-