Cognitive Reframing

Role

Cognitive reframing is the intervention backbone of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) — the most thoroughly evidence-based psychological treatment available — and the practice most directly targeting the distinction between objective stressors and subjective stress experience. The same job, relationship, or financial situation produces radically different stress levels in people with different cognitive patterns — with catastrophizers, black-and-white thinkers, and people who personalize external events experiencing dramatically more stress than people who maintain cognitive flexibility and realistic appraisal under identical circumstances. Developing cognitive flexibility and reframing capacity reduces stress not by changing the world but by changing the interface through which the world is processed — a more accessible and more sustainable target for intervention than most external circumstances.