I often describe Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) as a system of ideas for facing life’s most difficult challenges. It is a philosophy of life and a distinct form of cognitive behavior therapy. I wish to highlight the integration and synergistic effect of particular core concepts of REBT. In addition to writing about how these concepts interact, I have attempted to diagram this interaction in the picture below. Seeing and studying how these core concepts interrelate will deepen your appreciation of REBT as a system of interacting ideas. This deeper understanding will assist you in using REBT to do what you can to make your life closer to how you want it to be.
First, Focus on Your Emotional Disturbance
REBT initially aims to help you not disturb yourself when facing adversity. However, REBT has another recommendation, which, in some respects, is a more ambitious goal. After you learn how to cultivate healthy negative emotions to adversity and overcome disturbing yourself, you can use this system of ideas to make structural changes to increase the depth of your happiness and personal meaning. These are two different goals for using REBT ideas and strategies. Often, people see REBT as an antidote for emotional disturbance but may fail to appreciate how it can be highly beneficial for making significant changes in your life. Achieving greater life satisfaction and meaning rests on making more fundamental changes. REBT aims to help you become a long-term pleasure seeker; therefore, it can be instrumental when attempting to make overarching changes in the structure of your life, which will maximize your pleasure and meaning.
Research in REBT has shown that it is easier to use it to reduce emotional disturbance than it is to improve what psychologists call subjective well-being. Either through committed self-therapy or with a REBT therapist, in as few as ten sessions or less, patients who work at REBT can see significant relief on psychological inventories that measure anxiety and depression, the two common categories of symptoms reported in outpatient practice. However, there are two ways to improve subjective happiness. When judging progress in this area, psychologists measure a construct called Life Satisfaction. Improving life satisfaction scores on tests designed to measure it is more challenging than symptom reduction of anxiety, anger, and depression. REBT can help you improve life satisfaction, but you will need to exert more effort over a more extended period to experience improvements in life satisfaction.
Improving Life Satisfaction Through Structural Changes
There are two paths to improve life satisfaction. To some extent, they overlap. One way is to cultivate a vitally absorbing interest. Albert Ellis, the originator of REBT, taught that vitally absorbing interests lead people to greater happiness and often protect them to some extent against experiencing anxiety and depression. Examples of vitally absorbing interests include building a business, building a family, and political activism. He also taught that humans tended to be happiest when they had one or more significant involvements with other humans. Humans are social animals and often partner with others, both romantically and non-romantically, to achieve life’s big goals.
The second path to improve life satisfaction was to make a structural change in one’s life. Structural changes are fundamental changes in where, how, and with whom you live your life and what you do with your time and money. Examples would be changing where you live, initiating or ending significant relationships, changing careers, and assuming responsibility for raising a child. Pursuing additional education and investing in or starting a business would be other examples of course alterations in life with potentially far-reaching consequences in life satisfaction.
The second path of making a structural change overlaps with pursuing a vitally absorbing interest. Structural changes often require enormous effort, time, and usually money. The focus and energy needed to make a structural change in your life often become a vital absorbing interest for the time required to make the change.
Using the ABC model of REBT to teach how to enact a structural change, I first emphasize the importance of cultivating healthy attitudes to experience healthy negative emotions (concern, displeasure, disappointment, sadness), which I call achieving an emotional or philosophical solution to your problems. You must learn to experience healthy negative emotions in response to a dissatisfying situation to avoid making impulsive decisions or undermining the execution of a well-planned effort to make changes. However, given that these healthy negative emotions are motivating, they are good as you can leverage them to fuel the effort to make fundamental changes in your life. Healthy negative emotions get you to change what you can, whereas unhealthy negative emotions may keep you stuck in an unsatisfying situation. If you are motivated to make a change due to your unhealthy negative emotions (e.g., despair, anger, hurt), there is a better chance you will not use good judgment in your planning or execution of the changes you attempt to make. With unhealthy negative emotions, you may also not stay the course in making the fundamental changes in your life.
Calculated Risk-taking
Using REBT to make a structural change to increase long-term life satisfaction usually involves taking a calculated risk. You could fail in your effort to achieve your goal. Another possible outcome is that you achieve your goal and find it is less rewarding than anticipated or that there are unanticipated negatives to the change you made.
I always recommend that you recognize in advance of calculated risk-taking that there are no perfect solutions to life’s challenges and that what you are likely to find are tradeoffs. You make the structural change because you believe you will welcome the tradeoffs and, in the final analysis, have greater life satisfaction or meaning as a result of the efforts that you have made.
Scientific Thinking
You need to base your calculated risk on scientific thinking. REBT emphasizes scientific thinking. Scientific thinking is the foundation of emotional health when facing adversity or taking a calculated risk. You need to be aware of your assumptions, make logical deductions, and hope you consider the most critical factors impacting your future life satisfaction. You hope you do not have blinders on for essential variables that will undermine the success of your calculated risk. When you think scientifically, you are more likely to establish emotional health. Note that unhealthy negative emotions based on antiscientific thinking increase the chance that you will have psychological blinders on as you make your plans and enact them.
Uncertainty Tolerance and Discomfort Tolerance
Another REBT idea that factors into calculated risk-taking is uncertainty tolerance and discomfort tolerance. Scientific thinking facilitates both uncertainty tolerance and discomfort tolerance. When you have a scientific outlook on life, you fully recognize that we live in a world of probability and cannot have certainty. Even when you carefully map out your calculated risk, there is no certainty that you will succeed or, at some future point, regret the decision to make a fundamental change. You need to tolerate the discomfort of expending the effort that leads to a fundamental change and make it without possessing a guarantee that all your effort will pay off in the end. You, therefore, need both discomfort tolerance and uncertainty tolerance to make structural changes in your life.
Healthy Sense of Humor and Unconditional Self-Acceptance
REBT encourages you to have a healthy sense of humor about the process of life because even our best-laid plans may go awry. It is best to accept yourself unconditionally. Scientific thinking establishes unconditional self-acceptance and enables a healthy sense of humor to emerge when your plans fail, or you make a misstep. Unconditional self-acceptance allows you to have a healthy concern you could fail but not to fear it or hang your head in shame once it occurs. Unconditional self-acceptance rests on clear, logical, scientific thinking. If you fail, this merely proves you are a fallible human. Your failure does not prove you are a failure, a fool, an idiot. If you fail and wrongly think of yourself as a failure, you are defining yourself as a failure, but you cannot prove this true. Defining yourself as a failure also would be both emotionally harmful and antiscientific. You can empirically prove you failed but not empirically prove that you are a failure and will always fail. You are too complex and in constant change with an unknowable future to conclude you are a failure if you follow logic and maintain a scientific outlook. Discipline your mind to stick to the facts and not resort to emotionally harmful definitions of human value. Discipline your mind to keep a scientific perspective.
Non-awfulizing Attitudes
The consideration of failure brings us to two other core concepts of REBT. Those are cultivating a non-awfulizing attitude towards adverse outcomes and unconditional life acceptance. When we think scientifically, we reason correctly about percentages and bad outcomes. We rate outcomes on a scale of badness from 0% to 100%. By logic and definition, we cannot surpass 100% negative in evaluating an undesirable outcome. Awful results do not exist when we fail if we properly define awful. Different degrees of good and bad outcomes exist. You may take a calculated risk and find that you are surprised by the bad outcome you encounter. You might rate the outcome as moderately bad or very bad. Alternatively, you might evaluate the outcome as 90% bad and wish you had not taken the risk. However, you acknowledge that despite the lousy outcome, things could be worse; therefore, you cannot rate the bad outcome as 100% bad. You see that the planned risk produced an unexpected adverse outcome, which is not awful, no matter how bad. You reason scientifically. You have learned through experience, and you live your life from there. You will feel disappointed and sad, as these are healthy negative emotions from your strong desire to achieve a favorable outcome.
Unconditional Life Acceptance
A scientific stance towards the whole of life leads to the conclusion that there are good and relatively bad chapters in one’s life. However, by staying with scientific reasoning, you refuse to assign a global rating to life because you acknowledge that good can come from bad outcomes; therefore, even a rather lousy experience can lead to learning something valuable that will aid you in your subsequent calculated risk! This realization allows for unconditional life acceptance. Discipline your mind to evaluate the good, neutral, and bad aspects of any part of life and any outcome of a calculated risk. If you do so, you will inevitably conclude that life is too complex to warrant a single global rating. Keep striving for better, but acknowledge utopias do not exist.
I have shown how scientific thinking is the root of calculated risk-taking. Furthermore, scientific thinking also lies at the core of other fundamental ideas of REBT that enable calculated risk-taking. REBT is a system of ideas that interact with each other. Those concepts, to name a few, include uncertainty and discomfort tolerance, an anti-awfulizing attitude, unconditional self-acceptance, and unconditional life acceptance. Remaining in a scientific stance towards the outcome of your efforts, yourself, and life will enable you to retain a healthy sense of humor. There is no avoiding the possibility that even the best-laid plans may go awry. May the hand of fate support your calculated risks. Enjoy the adventure!
