The skill known as cognitive reappraisal, is one powerful way of skillfully nudging your emotions back toward baseline (Barlow et al., 2011). Cognitive reappraisal involves recognizing the negative pattern your thoughts have fallen into, and changing that pattern to one that is more effective. Changing the course of your thoughts, or how you’re making sense of things, can in turn change the course of your emotions, turning the dial down a couple of notches. Feeling more even-keel, it becomes easier to address whatever triggered the negative emotions, and to do so skillfully. For example, imagine you take a wrong turn on the way to a party and end up getting lost, making you considerably late. Your first response may be to get frustrated, appraising the situation by thinking “This road construction is terrible! The city needs to get it together to find a different way of detouring traffic.” This appraisal may make you angry. If you are more prone to anger, your anger may run away with you, causing you to be fuming and ruin your time at the party once you arrive.

Instead of playing out this unpleasant, seemingly automatic cycle, take a moment to consider another perspective (reappraisal) you might have in this situation. The mere act of considering other interpretations can help to loosen your grip on your more angry perspective. Furthermore, other ways of looking at this situation might cause you to experience other feelings. Consider the following reappraisals:

· I always get lost. Why can’t I seem to do anything right?

· Oh no! If I’m late to the party, everyone will be angry at me and no one will talk to me.

· I have the birthday cake in the trunk. Now everyone at the party will have to wait for me before they can get started, and that’s miserable.

These different ways of thinking about the situation will obviously elicit different emotional responses, although they’re not really an improvement on the first response. What’s interesting about them is that all of them contain at least a kernel of truth. None of them is out-and-out irrational. Some of them may be a bit extreme, but not irrational. This is significant because it illustrates there usually isn’t just one way of making sense of a situation. All are valid. This means it’s possible to take an alternative perspective that is more effective in helping us feel more balanced.

Now consider the following reappraisals:

· Thank God, I will spare myself 30 minutes of talking to Elizabeth. I dodged a bullet there!

· I’m late again. I might as well enjoy the scenery while I’m driving around.

· People probably won’t care that much that I’m late.

· I’m usually on-time. What a fluke!

· Life happened.