The Complete Step-by-Step ABC Process

I’m going to give you the complete process for cognitive journaling. But don’t worry if it seems complicated: once you get used to doing it, the steps will flow naturally, one from another. To help you learn those steps in greater detail, however, I’ll also be giving you a detailed plan for focusing on each step over a period of weeks. So read on for the general overview, and stick around for the action plan.

In each step, I will give you the practical instructions and then highlight points to pay attention to, as well as offer some examples. Try doing a full round of this along with me now.

Start by taking an actual diary or a digital file of your preference. Recall an episode or an idea you’d like to journal about. Remember, this practice is good for coping with strong negative emotions, so choose a situation that elicited a strong response that you’d like to investigate further.

When doing so, you should use the order: C → A → B. Look at the consequences first, then the activating event, and finally the belief that connects the two.

1. Start with consequences: emotions and behaviors

Write down the emotion or behavior that you want to reflect upon. Apply the three principles of description: falsifiability, nonjudgment, and detail.

Points to pay attention to:

Drop judgments and make sure that what you’re writing is not an opinion.

Make sure that you can falsify it (either you felt it or not).

A useful form to rely on is “I felt [enter specific emotion].” Avoid saying “I was angry/happy/etc.” because that deprives you of some perspective on the relative, transient nature of emotions. Say instead: “I felt [the emotion of] anger,” or “I felt joy,” or “I felt tiredness.” For behaviors, use a form like “I [action verb],” like “I screamed at the other driver” or “I ran away from the party without saying goodbye.”

Avoid confusing thoughts with emotions. This happens when you say things like “I felt inferior” or “I felt like a winner.” These are not emotions, but thoughts. In this step focus on emotions and actions and leave out opinions. Say in the first case “I felt weak” and in the second “I felt confident and strong.” Later on we will dig into the beliefs that cause such emotions.

The juice of our lives is to be found in the emotions and behaviors that are the consequences of the ABC sequence. When you want to change, your ultimate purpose is to change the consequences. So that’s where we start from.

2. Describe the A (activating event)

Describe the situation you were in when you experienced the consequence from before. Here again, you should avoid judgments and opinions, and use detail. You should be able to say yes or no to the experience.

Examples of describing the activating event:

“My mother-in-law is snobbish” versus “I thought that my mother-in-law was being snobbish.” You can falsify the latter: you either thought it or not. You can’t falsify the former.

“He’s being evasive” versus “He didn’t answer my texts for over two hours.” The former is a judgment. The latter is a fact.

“She wasn’t kind to me” versus “She threw the bag at me and slammed the door in my face without saying anything.” The second offers much more detail.

3. Find out the B (belief)

With your consequence and activating event at hand, try to remember the thought that you entertained in your reaction. Sometimes it will be overt, like “This always happens to me,” while other times it will be so subtle or so embedded in your worldview that you won’t be able to figure it out easily. Those are what psychologists call automatic thoughts.

This task isn’t easy to accomplish at the beginning, but through practice you can usually figure out the beliefs you were entertaining.

Express the beliefs you uncover in the form of “I thought that [insert belief]” and apply the three principles.

Some questions can ease this process. Given an activating event:

What did this event mean for me at the moment?

Why did I feel this emotion or behave that way?

What did I think following the event that could have caused that feeling/behavior?

What was my thought at the moment of the event?

Reverse check: With the belief I’ve found, would I expect to feel that specific consequence?

When you spot some unlikable thought, you will often react with a negative emotion and then start judging the thought itself. These are secondary ABCs, opinions or judgments that you form based on your own experiences. They constitute stories about your emotions and thoughts, which are neither good nor bad per se. They also constitute most of our thinking.

As you journal, if you are not careful, you’ll keep engaging in the same mental dialogue that you have in everyday life. Try to be mindful of this and go back to your initial ABC and question.

For example: Given the emotion C =anger and the activating event A = speaking to my father, consider the following beliefs:

Well-formed belief = “I thought, ‘He never listens to me.’” This is a statement, not a judgment (it’s a fact I experienced), and it is falsifiable (I either thought it or not).

Badly-formed belief = “I felt angry because my father always treats me badly” (external explanatory thought). A better belief is “I felt angry because I thought, ‘My father always treats me badly.’”

Badly-formed belief = “I shouldn’t have felt angry.” This belief belongs to a secondary ABC in which you judge your anger. In this ABC, you feel guilt (C, which can become a tertiary A), leading to the belief (B) “I am a bad person” and then sadness (C)—and on and on.

As you can see, the incorrect beliefs violate the three principles. “I shouldn’t feel angry” is a judgment, is not falsifiable (how do I know that I shouldn’t feel angry?), and lacks detail (why shouldn’t you feel angry in general?).

Why is finding the belief important?

Finding the belief is the most important part of this process, because the belief is the only element you can exert influence upon.

While emotions are the juice of life, thoughts are the scaffold upon which you form meanings and which determine who you are and what you do. Life is lived and experienced in the consequence, but all your satisfactions, happiness, and pain find their cause in your beliefs. Helpful beliefs can make the worst activating event bearable (as when you practice gratitude, for example), and unhelpful ones can make a decent activating event hellish.

4. Challenge the Bs (beliefs)

You challenge a belief by evaluating its validity, doubting it, and finding a better alternative.

With your belief identified, evaluate it by asking yourself the following questions and journaling on them:

Is this belief flexible enough to accommodate all events, or is it rigid and all or nothing?

Is this belief logical or based on faulty logic?

Is this belief congruent with facts and experience, or is it incongruent and not based on reality?

Is this belief useful in the pursuit of my objectives? Does it help me to feel good about myself and my life?

It might not always be easy to answer these questions, in part because you may have already invested your emotions in them. It can be helpful to imagine that the thoughts you are examining were someone else’s, so that you can gain more distance from them. For example, you could ask yourself what you would say to a beloved child who expressed that belief.

Often, our distorted thoughts depend on what we wish were true (“Relationships are easy”), and it can be hard to let go of that.

When you find thoughts that don’t seem valid, it’s time to weaken them. You can do that by doubting them, using another set of questions:

Which concrete proofs do I have of the truth of this belief? How can I prove this?

Example: B = “People don’t find me funny.” Has anyone ever told me that? Do I know at least one person who laughs at my jokes? How do I measure being funny? Can it be measured at all? Can I quantify it? Have I ever asked someone if they find me funny?

Does this belief help me feel good and achieve my objectives?

Example: B = “I am not meant to be an entrepreneur.” Does this belief put me in a productive, positive emotional state? Does it make it more easy for me to embrace challenges and experiment with new things? If my goal is to start a business, does thinking this belief help me make attempts in that direction, or does it foster procrastination?

In the case of a belief that causes anxiety, ask: Is my belief about the event I fear founded? Is the event I fear really so terrible? What’s the worst thing that could actually happen? How likely is my belief to come true?

Why should things not be like this? Is it possible to always have the world go according to my wishes?

Example: B = “My Medium article only got three claps, so I must suck.” Are my expectations of success founded? Can I really predict how a single article will do? Does this event really determine my entire success as an author? Can I accept it and see it as a stepping stone in my learning path?

5. Write down good alternative beliefs

Ask yourself: Which alternative thought can I think? Which alternative thought is logical, reality-based, flexible, and useful in pursuing my goals and feeling good?

Example: “I didn’t write an article today, so I must not be a true writer.” A better alternative could be “I didn’t write an article today, but that doesn’t imply that I cannot become a productive writer by practice. Even professional writers can miss some days. I can use this as feedback to learn about what things get in my way.”

You might have to work through many alternatives, but you’ll eventually find one or more that fit. So repeat this last step as many times as needed when you journal cognitively.

This might seem hard at first, but you will in time build the skill of questioning your thoughts. Eventually you will be able to do it automatically, even as you go about your daily life.

How to form good alternative beliefs

Beliefs are not good or bad per se, but they can be more or less useful. Their relative pleasantness or unpleasantness stems from the emotions they can cause. Beliefs can be grouped by the following characteristics:

Illustration by the author.

As you form your new beliefs, you should check them against the “Useful Belief” column above to help ensure that they have the qualities that make them useful.

Putting it all together

In summary, your journaling should flow in this sequence:

Step 1: Write down the consequence—emotion or behavior—in the form of “I felt [insert emotion]” or “I did/behaved [insert behavior].”

Step 2: Write down the activating event in the form of “This [insert event] happened” or “The situation was [insert situation or place].”

Step 3: Draw out the belief by asking and answering questions in your journal about what the activating event meant to you, and expressing the belief in the form of “At that moment, I thought that [insert belief].”

Step 4: Challenge the belief. Ask yourself what proof you have of it. Ask if the belief is useful or not useful.

Step 5: Form a replacement belief. You can write out multiple replacement beliefs to “try on.” Check them for qualities of useful beliefs: Are they flexible, congruent with reality, logically sound, and supportive of your wellbeing?

You can use this process to learn to observe how events, thoughts, and emotions link to each other. In a sense, you are learning to reverse-engineer your emotions into the ideas that caused them.

You will also be less likely to fall prey to your chain of thoughts and emotions, as you’ll be able to spot them when they happen. Sometimes people end up with emotions that they don’t know the origin of, such as “I simply felt that way.” The truth is that you can always find out what belief preceded an emotion, and you can often also walk your way back to its origin.