117 Quotes by David D. Burns

Guilt doesn’t help. What should fill in for it? Remorse. Remorse is when you feel bad about what you did. Guilt is when you feel bad about who you are.

Regret has a purpose. It’s like the oil light on the dashboard of your life, telling you something needs to be fixed. So fix it. And feel better.

I suspect you will find that a great many of your negative feelings are in fact based on such thinking errors.

But these abnormal emotions feel just as valid and realistic as the genuine feelings created by undistorted thoughts, so you automatically attribute truth to them. This is why depression is such a powerful form of mental black magic.

Your thoughts create your emotions; therefore, your emotions cannot prove that your thoughts are accurate.

In my experience the most crucial predictor of recovery is a persistent willingness to exert some effort to help yourself. Given this attitude, you will succeed.

People who are prone to anxiety are nearly always people-pleasers who fear conflict and negative feelings like anger. When you feel upset, you sweep.

Absolutes do not exist in this universe. If you try to force your experiences into absolute categories, you will be constantly depressed because your perceptions will not conform to reality. You will set yourself up for discrediting yourself endlessly because whatever you do will never measure up to your exaggerated expectations. The technical name for this type of perceptual error is “dichotomous thinking.” You see everything as black or white – shades of gray do not exist.

In addition, we still do not really know how the brain creates emotions. We do not know why some people are more prone to negative thinking and gloomy moods throughout their lives, whereas others seem to be eternal optimists who always have a positive outlook and a cheerful disposition.