The Emotionary No.10 - Pleased. A CBT Perspective

Pleased

[Pleez-d] Adjective

Pleased is like a pencil case, zipped up neatly. Inside is everything you need for a good life:

A pen; to write a letter to a friend.

An eraser; to forgive mistakes.

A ruler; because sometimes you can just put a line under things.

From a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) perspective, emotions are not just random occurrences. They are directly generated by how we perceive and interpret our experiences. To develop the feeling of being ‘pleased’, we first need to be aware of the constant internal commentary that is running through our minds. Sometimes it can feel as if this commentary focusses mostly on the difficult or unpleasant parts of life but often, even when we have a difficult day ahead of us, there may be something pleasant or positive that we can notice alongside the tasks we are not looking forward to. We can begin to do this by actively noticing and naming small successes or pleasant moments throughout the day, rather than letting our brain gloss over them. For example, by intentionally replacing minimising thoughts (like "Anyone could have done this" or "It’s no big deal") with balanced, validating thoughts (such as "I worked hard on this, and I'm proud of how it turned out"), we reinforce a positive cognitive feedback loop. Over time, this deliberate practice of pausing to notice the satisfaction (or even better, to journal or write down what we notice), ‘rewires’ our automatic thinking patterns, making the emotion of feeling pleased a more frequent, accessible and pleasant state of mind.