When you’re going through tough times, it’s normal to try and understand what is happening. The way you explain events to yourself is called your ‘explanatory style’. And that style just might be increasing your stress. An interesting article about this can be found on the Very Well Mind site. Here’s a quick rundown on what that article says.

Three dimensions of internal explanation

You draw on three factors when explaining events to yourself: stability; globality and internality. You assess stability by deciding if an event or situation is a one-time thing is likely to happen again. Your assessment of globality is based on your assumptions about when an event impacts your entire life or just a portion of it. Finally, your beliefs about whether things happen to you or are caused by you create your ‘internality’.

Why does this cause STRESS?

So how do those three factors impact your stress? Put simply, the explanations you create can impact on your emotions.  If you assume a bad situation will go on forever, for example, your assessment of stability will trigger a stress reaction. As the Very Well Mind article points out “optimists tend to have more positive explanatory styles—ones that minimise stressful situations as unstable, local, and external and take credit for positive experiences as being more stable, global, and internal”.

What to do about it

The good news is that you can change your explanatory style fairly easily. First, you need to identify and correct cognitive errors. This are flawed thinking patterns and often are linked to deeply held beliefs about stability, globabilty and internality. You can learn to question these errors and create a more positive (less stress-inducing!) style of thinking.

So the next time problems emerge in your life, remember this: your thinking impacts your well-being. Developing a positive explanation style helps you handle stress and become more resilient. Recognise cognitive distortions, set goals and express gratitude to explain things positively.

You can read more in the original article here.

This article summary was created by Eleanor Shakiba

Eleanor is a leadership trainer, success coach and people skills expert. She helps managers and business owners build thriving teams and organisations, using tools from Positive Psychology. She's trained more than 60,000 people during her career as a corporate trainer and professional development consultant. Her mission is inspiring talented people to become leaders who make a difference.