Test Your Can'ts

Test your cant's. I think the name says it all. This technique is about putting your negative houghts to the test. In Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy Revised and Updated, David Burns writes:

"An extremely successful cognitive technique involves testing your negative predictions with actual experiments. Suppose for example, you've been telling yourself: 'I'm so upset that I can't concentrate well enough to read anything at all.' As a way of testing this hypothesis, sit down with today's newspaper and read one sentence, and then see if you can summarize the sentence out loud. You might then predict -- 'But I could never read and understand a whole paragraph.' Again -- put this to the test. Read a paragraph and summarize. Many sever, chronic depressions have been cracked open with this powerful method."

I like this technique! Rather than just think you can't do something, try and prove it. Test yourself and you may be pleasantly surprised.