Edel was a lady who came to see me with a health phobia. Whenever she got a pain or an ache, she would convince herself that it was something serious. She knew in her heart and soul that it wasn’t serious, but this didn’t help.

“Why can’t I just see that there’s nothing wrong with me,” she despaired when we first met.

People’s attitude towards her didn’t help either. Her friends would spend hours trying to convince her about how irrational she was being. Can you not just see that there’s nothing wrong with you. It was this not been able to ‘see’ that was making it worse.

Her family and friends could all see that there was nothing physically wrong with her, but she couldn’t. How could this be? She knew she was an intelligent woman in every other way, but no matter how much she tried to convince herself that there was nothing wrong with her, she just couldn’t accept it.

Knowing our thinking to be wrong but still not been able to correct it is very common. Considering that we spend so much of our lives dealing with the fall out of our emotions, very few people know precisely where they come from or why we feel a certain way in one situation and something else in another.

Chain Reaction

Epictetus was a Greek philosopher who said that: “People are not disturbed by events, but by the interpretation of which they make of them.” Sounds very simple, doesn’t it. But it is this simple concept that is ?the basis of all cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) thinking. You see, the reason Edel was feeling anxious was because she was interpreting what each ache meant to her in a way that even she was unaware of.

When we encounter a situation, we set up a chain reaction of thoughts in our head. These thoughts are a bit like switching on a light. The switch starts an electrical chain reaction that is instantaneous, it doesn’t cause the light, the bulb does that.

Our emotions trigger the same way. When something happens to us, we interpret it. We then interpret our interpretation. We then go through a whole series of interpretations until we finally conclude as to what the event means to us. Like the light switch, however, this emotional chain reaction happens instantaneously. We don’t consciously have to interpret each interpretation. The chain reaction is instant.

What things mean to you can be influenced by where you are in your life now. So that things you never thought about can suddenly become hugely significant as our life circumstances change.

John was a man who came to see me because he had developed a fear of flying. This had only manifested itself when he had children. When he was single, he only had to think about himself. Now he thought: ‘What will happen to my children if I’m killed?’ His interpretation of dying had changed in that he now thought: ‘It’s no longer just about me’. The consequences of dying had changed what dying meant to him.

Logical versus emotional

When something happens to us, we process it in two parts of our mind. We start two interpreting chain reactions. Both our logical and emotional brains tell us different things. The next time you’re on your own, notice the internal conversation that goes on in your head. This is your logical and emotional brains trying to make sense of the world you are living in.

Whenever our emotional brain conflicts with our logical brain, our emotional brain always wins out. That is why if we miss winning the lotto by one digit, we regard it as being worse than if none of our numbers came up. As we go through life, these two minds are in continual communication with each other. Have you ever felt in two minds about something? Well, this is your logical and emotional mind in conference with each other.

When we are mentally healthy, we are able to find a balance between the messages we receive from these two minds and when we find this balance between our two minds, we refer to this as our wise mind.

Decisions made in this wise mind are usually better decisions than those made in either our logical or emotional minds. The wise mind is able to take into account how you feel about something while been able to balance this by logically figuring out what’s in your long-term interest.

Finding this balance is essential to being happy, having good relationships and being able to cope with life’s stressors. Remember, in real life the only thing that appears in black and white is a newspaper.

Mentally healthily people can balance what their emotional and logical minds tell them. That is, they make their decisions based on what their wise mind tells them more of the time.

But because we’re human we all have a natural inclination to think and behave irrationally. Mentally healthy people do not think and behave rationally all the time because that’s not possible. In order to be mentally healthy, you only need to be practicing it more often. The most effective way of practising it is to change how you behaviourally react to situations.

Healthy versus unhealthy

Being able to find a balance between the often-conflicting messages that our logical and emotional minds give us is essential to living. It helps us find equilibrium between what we need versus what we want.

Similarly, the easy way to figure out whether an emotion is healthy or unhealthy is by looking at the effect the emotion is going to have on your ability to cope with what’s happening in your life.

Healthy negative emotions, such as anger, alert us to the fact that there is something wrong with our world and they help us identify effective responses that will help us deal effectively with the problem. They empower us to act in a way that helps us problem solve and are self-limiting in that they fade over time once that have served their purpose.

Unhealthy emotions, such ?as anxiety, disempower us from dealing with problems. They also generate more problems for us in that, not only do you have the problem, but you also have an anxiety washing machine going on in your head. A bit like trying to solve an algebra problem by chewing gum, which you end up chewing even after the original problem has gone away.

We can’t control the initial reaction of anxiety in our bodies, but we do have control over the way we react to it. By changing our thoughts and beliefs, we can change the way we experience anxiety.

To improve our mental health, we need to find a good balance in how we allow our logical and emotional minds to influence our lives. We can use them to create a balance between rational thinking and emotional feeling. By understanding where emotions come from and how they affect us, we can better control our responses to them, helping us live a more balanced and fulfilling life.

Enda Murphy is a cognitive behavioral therapist and the director of SeeMe.ie