What Is Cognitive Reappraisal?
A Core Emotion Regulation Strategy in CBT
Everyone experiences difficult emotions like anxiety, sadness, and anger—they’re an unavoidable part of being human. In fact, these uncomfortable feelings often serve an important purpose, alerting us to problems or motivating change. But when emotional responses become too intense or persistent, they can spiral out of control and stop being useful.
For example, sadness can turn into depression, anxiety may evolve into panic attacks, and anger can fuel outbursts or aggression. When this happens, having tools to manage overwhelming emotions becomes essential. One of the most effective emotional regulation techniques in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is known as cognitive reappraisal—also called cognitive reframing or cognitive restructuring.
So what is cognitive reappraisal? Cognitive Reappraisal Definition: Cognitive reappraisal, a potent emotional regulation technique, involves identifying and transforming negative thought patterns into more effective ones. By altering how you perceive situations, you can dial down negative emotions, making it easier to address triggers with skill and maintain emotional balance.
Why Emotions Can Become Overpowering
When you're caught in the grip of strong emotions, you might notice your thinking narrows dramatically. Cognitive flexibility disappears—and your thoughts start to mirror your mood. When you're anxious, your mind generates threatening scenarios. When you're sad, it focuses on loss. When you're angry, your thoughts may exaggerate injustice or blame.
This mental tunnel vision reinforces and intensifies the emotional experience, creating a negative feedback loop: emotions shape thoughts, which then amplify emotions, and the cycle continues. Over time, this loop can contribute to chronic emotional conditions such as generalized anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, and emotional dysregulation. Even in everyday life, this cycle can ruin your mood and decision-making.
How Cognitive Reappraisal Breaks the Cycle of Emotion Dysregulation
Cognitive reappraisal is a research-backed CBT strategy that interrupts the feedback loop between negative thoughts and overwhelming emotions. Instead of reacting automatically to distressing feelings, this technique helps you take a step back and reinterpret the situation through a more balanced lens.
The process involves identifying distorted or unhelpful thoughts, challenging their accuracy, and replacing them with more constructive interpretations. For example, instead of thinking, “I’ll never succeed,” you might reframe the thought as, “I’ve faced setbacks before and eventually made progress.”
By altering your internal narrative, cognitive reappraisal reduces the emotional intensity of a situation, helping you return to emotional baseline. From that calmer, more centered state, you’re better able to respond thoughtfully rather than react impulsively.
Benefits of Cognitive Reappraisal in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Enhanced Emotion Regulation
There are numerous benefits of regularly applying cognitive reappraisal to challenging situations. Reappraising cognitions can improve emotional regulation by ensuring reactions to events aren't distorted or extreme. Emotion regulation is the process of managing our feelings and reactions to cope with different situations effectively. By having a better way of making sense of things, we are better able to manage our feelings to ensure they don't overwhelm us.
Improved Problem-Solving
Reappraising thoughts can also enhance the effectiveness of your problem-solving when challenges arise. When we're faced with difficult situations, we often experience stronger emotions that can distort our thinking. Cognitive reappraisal is a set of skills we can rely on time and again to find the most reasonable interpretation of the event and act accordingly. By maintaining a cool head and accurately assessing the circumstances, we are better positioned to confidently and adaptively solve the problems that come our way and achieve a constructive outcome.
Increase Resilience
Cognitive reappraisal can be a helping coping strategy for improving our ability to recover from a setback. Changing how we perceive problems to see them in a more grounded or realistic way can improve our ability to bounce back and find the motivation to persist. This happens because the setback was not as emotionally overwhelming as it might otherwise have been and because we can reframe things to improve our confidence, encouraged that we have a greater chance of being successful the next time.
Better Relationships
Cognitive reappraisal can improve the quality of our relationships by helping us to better manage conflicts and avoid misunderstandings. Instead of reacting to another's actions with anger or frustration, we're able to choose to see things from their perspective and find a more skillful way to engage. In this way, reappraisal can lead to stronger relationships by improving communication and reducing the potential for anger and resentment.
Improved Physical Health
Believe it or not, cognitive reappraisal can also profoundly influence our physical health by managing the impact of stress on our bodies. Changing how we make sense of problems can lower our levels of stress hormones, such as cortisol, which can lead to better health and well-being in the short and long term. Specifically, regularly managing chronic stress with cognitive reappraisal can result in improved sleep, immune system functioning, cognitive performance, and cardiovascular health. Additionally, cognitive reappraisal is often used to improve our ability to make healthier choices, such as starting an exercise program or cutting out red meat.
How to Engage in Cognitive Reappraisal
There are numerous ways to implement cognitive reappraisal, but the most common are listed below.
Assess your automatic appraisals: Pick a challenging situation and identify the thoughts that made it seem difficult.
Identify maladaptive cognitive distortions or thinking traps. Look for common cognitive distortions such as fortune-telling, all-or-nothing thinking, or catastrophizing.
Investigate your automatic appraisal from different perspectives. List the evidence for and against these appraisals. Do they prove your automatic appraisal? Find alternative explanations. Consider whether other people would interpret this case differently and why.
Develop a reapprisal. Find a new adaptive way of thinking about the situation that is grounded in facts and helps you feel empowered to face the challenge more confidently.
Check out our free online workbook to learn more about how to perform cognitive appraisal and to download free worksheets you can use to help you: A Course in CBT Techniques.
An Example of Cognitive Appraisal
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 things by thinking, “This road construction is terrible! The city needs to get it together to find a different way of detouring traffic.” Your appraisal may make you exasperated. If you're prone to anger, your anger may run away with you, causing you to be fuming and ruining 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 you loosen your grip on your more angry perspective. Other ways of looking at this situation might even 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 mad 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 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 have validity. 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 goodness, 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 happens.
These beliefs also contain a kernel of truth. They're not merely the “power of positive thinking” but are reality-based ways of re-appraising the situation. Moreover, they'd probably be more effective in helping us keep our heads while we try to find our way to the party. While running over these new thoughts, you might still hear the old appraisal in your head: “This road construction is terrible! The city needs to get it together to find a different way of detouring traffic.” But now you can add some nuance to it, adding different viewpoints and thinking in a way that keeps a lid on your level of distress. The point is to allow other ways of making sense of a situation to coexist with the more emotionally triggering appraisal.
When to Seek Help
Cognitive Reappraisal is designed to be a tool for helping yourself be your own teacher for overcoming negative thought spirals. However, it's often helpful to seek out an expert cognitive behavioral therapist to get help when thinking patterns result in significant quality of life problems. If you or someone you know is experiencing anxiety and depression, or suffering from some other emotional problem, it's best to seek out a trained mental health professional to help you better learn these skills to recover more quickly and fully.
For more information or to schedule a consultation to see if cognitive reappraisal in CBT is right for you, click the button below.
Barlow, D.W. et al. (2011). Unified Protocol for Transdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders: Therapist Guide. London: Oxford University Press.