Cognitive Reframing

Think of a few people in your life you admire specifically for their emotional strength and resilience—not because they never get upset, but when they do get upset, they handle it surprisingly well…

• They get anxious, but they rarely get lost in worries and self-doubt
• They get angry and frustrated, but they almost never fly off the handle or lose their cool
• They feel guilty or ashamed if they’ve done something wrong, but they don’t fall into spirals of rumination or self-criticism

What is it that they do differently?

Not how were they raised differently. Not how are their personalities different. Not how lucky or unlucky were they in life. But when they get upset, how do they react differently? If you had to highlight one habit or tendency that sets these admirably resilient people apart, what would you point to?

Whenever I ask this question in classes or workshops, I usually get answers like: self-compassion, mindfulness, rationality, patience, humor, asking for help, flexibility, self-love, or growth mindset.

These are all excellent answers and I think they all do contribute to emotional resilience. But if you struggle to be resilient in the face of, say, anger or anxiety, the idea that you need to learn to be more self-compassionate, more mindful, more rational, more patient, more humorous, more self-loving, and more flexible probably feels a little… daunting!

Thankfully, there’s one emotional super skill at work behind all of these specific emotional skills. And if you can learn it, it makes all of them much easier.

This emotional super skill is called cognitive reframing. And in the rest of this guide, I’m going to unpack the psychology behind reframing and show you how you can use it to be stronger and more resilient in the face of any emotional difficulty from anxiety and grief to anger and shame.

What Is Reframing?

To understand reframing, take a look at the following photo and note how you feel in response to it… what emotions come up for you?

Maybe you feel a little angry like the guy in the photo. Or maybe a little anxious because that’s how you often feel around people who are angry.

Now take a look at this photo and note how you feel:

Maybe there’s still a little bit of anger or anxiety. But I’d bet something like curiosity, surprise, or confusion has become the dominant emotion.

It’s the same photo with the same subject, a young man looking angry. But the way the young man is presented—the framing of the photo—dramatically changes how we feel about it. In the first example, it’s highly cropped so that only the face is in view. In the second, we get a wide angle view that shows us a lot more of the context and background.

You don’t have to be a photographer or cinematographer to see how changing how a shot is framed can dramatically influence how we feel about it.

Luckily, how we frame things is largely under our control. And even if you’ve got a tendency to frame things in an unrealistic or unhelpful way—catastrophizing, for example, or being overly-judgmental—you can develop the skill of reframing your initial perspective into one that helps instead of hurts.

In a moment, I’m going to share some of the most important benefits that come from reframing plus some tactical advice on how to do it. But before we do, I want to make sure we’re all on the same page by offering a simple definition of reframing and then clear up a few of the biggest misconceptions out there about reframing.

Reframing: A Definition

There are all sorts of definitions of reframing out there, but here’s the one I use:

Reframing means intentionally adopting a more helpful perspective—especially in the face of fear, pain, or suffering.

There are two key terms in this definition:

• Intentionally. Reframing is a mental behavior—something you need to choose to do. With practice and training, it can become habitual. But especially in the beginning, it’s important to remember that reframing is a choice you always have the ability to make.
• More helpful. Reframing is a pragmatic tool. The goal is not necessarily to understand the truth of things so much as to respond to events and circumstances in the most helpful way possible given your goals and values.

Even with a fairly clear definition under our belts, there are a lot of misconceptions out there about reframing. So let me try and briefly address a few of the most common ones.

5 Misconception About Reframing

Here are the five misconceptions about reframing that I see most often:

1. Reframing is just positive thinking. A lot of people roll their eyes at the idea of reframing because they equate it with superficial 1980s style self-help mantras like Just think positive. But the goal of reframing is not to think more positively; the goal is to think more flexibly and constructively. If you have a bias in your thinking toward, say, being pessimistic, for you framing might well involve changing your perspective to incorporate more positive things; but that’s incidental to the bigger point which is being less rigid and more flexible in how you think and perceive the world. Many clients I work with are overly positive or too confident in certain circumstances, which means that for them, reframing usually involves being more negative in the way they think (considering risks, downsides, etc). But again, that’s incidental to the primary goal which is to be more flexible in their thinking.
2. Reframing means arguing with yourself. A lot of people assume that reframing means catching your brain making logical errors and disputing those errors with a more persuasive or reasonable argument. Again, you might end up noticing flawed logic in your thinking as a result of reframing, but that’s not the goal. The point isn’t to win an argument or decide which perspective is inherently more true than the other. The goal is to consider alternative perspectives and not get stuck in patterns of framing or storytelling that are unhelpful. What’s more, reframing is less about the content of a particular perspective and more about the perspective itself.
3. Reframing is just denial. One piece of pushback I often get on reframing is that it’s just denial and that by changing your perspective or interpretation you’re just distracting yourself from the cold hard truth that you don’t want to acknowledge. Now, while this process does happen—and you definitely can use reframing unhelpful as a distraction method—we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and assume that’s always happening. More often than not, this argument that reframing is always distraction or denial is a form of psychological arrogance that assumes our initial perspective is correct and dismisses the very idea of needing to question it or consider alternatives.
4. Reframing is magic. While some people are dismissive of reframing, there’s another set who are overly enthusiastic about it. They see it as a kind of magic formula where, if you just “get your thinking right,” you can solve any problem and become blissfully happy all the time. While reframing is incredibly powerful, it’s no panacea. There are no shortcuts. Like anything else, reframing takes some practice and patience, and even then, it won’t solve all your problems. That said, when you get good at reframing, one of the best benefits is that it tends to make every other problem in your life more tractable and easier to solve—whether that’s sticking to workout plan, broaching difficult conversations, staying focused on creative work, or letting go of worries and anxiety.
5. Reframing is a coping skill. Perhaps the most common (and dangerous) misconception about reframing is that it’s a way to cope with painful emotions. In other words, people naturally want to use reframing as a way to regulate or control how they feel emotionally. While the skill of reframing does tend to make you less emotionally reactive, and can help you navigate emotionally-challenging situations, that shouldn’t be the goal. Because if you use reframing with the intent to regulate your emotions, you kick off the emotional fear learning process which makes your emotional reactions more frequent, more intense, and longer lasting in the long-run. Think about it like exercise: If you try to go for a run in order to fall asleep, you will end up making it harder to fall asleep in the moment; however, consistent exercise does increase sleep drive which, over time, will make it easier to fall asleep.

With all that in mind, let’s talk about some of the most important benefits of reframing and how it can help you in your everyday life.

The Benefits of Reframing

The single biggest benefit of reframing is that it moderates our emotional reactions, and consequently, allows our behavior to be more value-aligned. Now, that’s a mouthful, so let me try to unpack that…

Many of our biggest struggles in life—from depression and addiction to procrastination and interpersonal conflict—stem from a common psychological pattern:

We unintentionally sacrifice our goals and values in order to avoid emotional pain.

For example:

• When we procrastinate we use distraction to avoid, say, fear of failure. And while the procrastination gives us relief in the short-term, the long-term cost is rushed work that’s of a lower quality than we’re capable of (plus all the disappointment and regret that go with it).
• When we overeat often it’s because we’re using the brief pleasure of food to distract from, say, stress. And while the pleasure of food helps briefly numb out the pain of stress, it makes us more stressed in the long-run because we feel guilty about violating our goals and values around healthy eating.
• When we get defensive we’re using criticism of others as a way to distract from our own insecurities. And while this feels like an ego boost in the moment, it comes with some pretty steep costs for the relationship like reduced trust and intimacy.

The core pattern in all these examples is that we end up engaging in counterproductive behavior (sometimes called self-sabotage or self-defeating behavior) because we are either unwilling or unable to deal with those painful emotions in a healthy way. And while you can learn to respond to difficult emotions better with tools and exercises like The AVA Method, wouldn’t it be easier if those emotions simply weren’t as painful and overwhelming to begin with?

For example:

• If you only had a little fear of failure vs. overwhelming fear of failure, it would be a lot easier to avoid the temptation to procrastinate and get your work done, right?
• If you only had a little stress after work rather than intense chronic stress it would be easier to stick to a healthy eating plan instead of using junk food to numb it out, right?
• If you only felt a little irritated with our spouse’s sarcastic comment rather than super angry, it would be easier to avoid defensiveness and escalating the conflict, right?

While it’s impossible to avoid painful emotions entirely, most of us experience excessively frequent and intense painful emotions because of subtle mental habits around how we frame what happens to us and how we feel. Specifically, if we frame what happens to us in overly overly-rigid and excessively negative ways, our emotional reactions will be correspondingly rigid and excessive too.

Let’s say you get a text from an old friend saying We need to talk. How you frame the text will largely dictate how you feel emotionally:

• If you frame it with a story that He’s mad at me… what did I do wrong? you’re likely to feel some mixture of fear and guilt.
• But if you frame it with a story like That’s true, we haven’t talked in ages… We should definitely catch up! you’re likely to feel something like joy, excitement, even love.

Same event, different reaction, totally dependent on the framing (in this case, the story you told yourself) of the event.

Or take a more common example: Suppose you get some explicitly negative feedback at work on a project…

• If your framing is That’s really disappointing, but at least I know exactly what I need to fix now you will definitely feel some painful emotion like embarrassment or anxiety, for instance.
• But suppose your framing is Oh no… she hated it. What if I lose my job? I’ll never be able to get another job like this. I never should have agreed to take on this project! Well, you can imagine that your emotional reaction is going to be much more intense and long-lasting with framing like this.

Again, same event but a very different emotional reaction.

Technically speaking, this is the result of a well-studied process called cognitive mediation, which says that events don’t cause emotions; rather, it’s our interpretation of what the events mean that leads to how we feel about them.

Reframing takes advantage of the fact that how we interpret or frame the events in our lives is something we have a large degree of control over. The implication is that by changing our perspective on what happens to us and reframing, we can not only experience more moderate emotional reactions, but more importantly, we increase our chances of following through on what really matters to us—aligning our behaviors and actions with our goals and values.

So, big picture, the benefit of reframing is that it helps us behave in ways that are more aligned with our values which, long-term, tends to help us feel better emotionally. But to make things a little more relatable, let’s look at a handful of specific benefits of cognitive reframing.

5 Specific Benefits of Cognitive Reframing

There are dozens of established and well-known benefits to reframing—from lower depression and reduced stress to better pain management—but I want to share a handful of my favorites, some of which tend to be pretty underrated:

1. Less Anxiety. More Confidence.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with thinking negatively or imagining possible risks or dangers in the future. In fact, the ability to anticipate and plan for legitimate threats is hugely important for our survival and wellbeing. But helpful planning and problem-solving turns into unhelpful worry and catastrophizing when that thinking is either A) Unrealistic, or B) Unhelpful.

For example: Suppose you find yourself worrying about saying something stupid before a big speech. Even if there’s a decent chance that you end up saying something stupid, it’s unlikely that continuing to worry about this possibility three minutes before you start your speech is helpful. Instead, a more helpful framing might be to recall how much you’re practiced and how well prepared you are. In this case, you’ve shifted your focus from one detail of the overall story (the possibility that you could say something stupid) to another detail (the fact that you’ve prepared very well).

When people struggle with chronic anxiety and insecurity, it’s usually because they’ve fallen into subtle mental patterns of framing things in overly-pessimistic or threat-oriented ways. But when you practice framing uncomfortable situations more flexibly, you allow your natural confidence and self-trust to shine through.

2. Less Avoidance. More Motivation.

A lot of the clients I work with come to see me because they have some meaningful creative project they want to either get started on or finish. But they find themselves habitually avoiding and procrastinating on this creative work which they know is really meaningful and important. You can probably relate to how frustrating an experience this is… Why do we so often have so little motivation for the things that matter most?! The key to resolving this dilemma is to realize that the problem isn’t too little motivation, but too much…

When we choose to procrastinate, it’s not that we don’t have motivation for our stated goal, it’s that other motivations are outcompeting that one. For example: If you decide to organize your art supplies instead of finishing your watercolor painting, it’s because you’re feeling more motivated to organize than to paint. But is organizing really that motivating? What’s actually going on here is that organizing allows you to avoid the discomfort of finishing your painting and allowing others to see and judge it, so the relief from anxiety is what motivates you to procrastinate rather than paint.

But having our true goals outcompeted by the desire to avoid emotional discomfort is often based on a subtle framing problem: we’re anticipating the pain of work but ignoring the pleasure. Most meaningful work—even very challenging work—involves a lot of pleasure in addition to the inevitable pain. The trouble is that we tend to frame the work exclusively in terms of how uncomfortable it will be now at the expense of imagining how good it will feel during and after. But if you can reframe your work to be more expansive about both the expected costs and benefits, you’ll find a lot less resistance and a lot more motivation to get started.

3. Less Defensiveness. More Intimacy.

More relationships are ruined by defensiveness than just about any other factor I can think of. The basic process goes like this: someone feels insecure, uses defensiveness and criticism to compensate, but in the process hurts the other person and damages the relationship. Once this becomes a pattern—especially if both parties are doing it—the accumulated stress of all that defensiveness simply becomes too much for the relationship to bear and it falls apart.

But both insecurity and defensiveness tend to be magnified by unhelpful framings. For example, people often feel insecure and get defensive when they frame feedback as a criticism of their character or worth rather than an assessment of a specific behavior or outcome. Think back to the example earlier of the boss’s criticism of a project at work… One person framed it as an indictment of their character and ability and consequently started spiraling into anxiety and rumination, while the other person framed it as an opportunity for improvement and was able to get on with things.

Of course, avoiding defensiveness by, say, not over-personalizing the way you frame negative feedback will help you to be less emotionally reactive. But more importantly, it will deepen and strengthen your most important relationships. When people see that they can give you honest feedback without worrying that you’ll misinterpret it or take it the wrong way, it builds trust. And the more trust a relationship has the easier it is to form deeper bonds of intimacy and authentic connection.

4. Less Resentment. More Compassion.

Besides defensiveness, one of the other most corrosive things we do in our relationships is generating resentment via expectations. Let’s say you have an elderly parent who calls you up every day—sometimes two or three times per day. When it first started happening several years ago it didn’t seem like a big deal. But now that you have young kids and a much busier schedule and life, it increasingly feels annoying to have your parent call you at odd times throughout the day and just chit chat about random things. As the years go on, what began as annoyance is starting to feel like resentment—you resent them for being overbearing and burdening an already stressful life. Pretty soon, this resentment leads to being short and irritable in your interactions with them or simply not visiting them as much overall. Of course, keep in mind, a lot of this is happening unconsciously: you’re not deliberately choosing to be resentful or avoid them; it’s just happening as a consequence of all these little micro-decisions and feelings accumulating over time.

Underneath all this resentment and irritability, it’s very likely some framing problems are at the root. And an especially common one is to frame their behavior in terms of your expectations of how they should behave. For example, you’re feeling annoyed that they call you all the time and at inopportune times, which is based on an expectation that they should appreciate how overwhelmed you are and be more thoughtful about calling at good times. Alternatively, you might reframe the fact that they call you all the time as an expression of their increasing loneliness and isolation. As they’ve gotten older, they have fewer friends around and have started relying on you, their only child, more for connection. Based on that framing, their calls might still be inconvenient, but there’s a good chance you’ll experience compassion or pity rather than (or at least in addition to) irritability.

Being stuck in one frame usually leaves us stuck with one emotion. But if you can add multiple frames to your experience, you open yourself up to a wider range of emotional responses, which in turn will affect how you behave, and eventually, the quality of your relationships that are downstream of those behaviors.

5. Less Rumination. More Agency.

Rumination is when we get stuck dwelling on something negative, usually from the past. For example: you made a bad financial decision twenty years ago that means you have to work a lot longer before retiring. And almost every night before bed you find yourself ruminating on the mistake: why you did it, what you should have done instead, how much it hurt your family, etc. Not only does this exacerbate your insomnia and make it harder to get good sleep, but over time it reinforces your self image as a failure and interferes with your agency and belief in yourself.

Analyzing this situation from a framing perspective, you might say that you have a bias toward focusing on the problem as opposed to identifying opportunities. This isn’t surprising since many of us are trained to be problem-solvers from the day we begin school through high school, college, and our careers. So it’s not surprising that our attention is biased toward identifying and analyzing and trying to fix the problems in our lives. Unfortunately, the opportunity cost of all this problem solving is that it leaves us drained, depleted, and low in confidence for the task of identifying and pursuing opportunities.

At its core, this is a framing problem. Yes, we’ve been trained to find and analyze problems, but what can be trained can be untrained. You can train yourself to reframe the story away from what went wrong and why toward what could go right and how. Maybe you carve out 15 minutes every evening before bed to brainstorm possible side hustles and ways to make extra cash so that you can retire earlier. Or make it a point once a week to do a brief self-gratitude exercise where you list 10 things about yourself that you appreciate and admire.

The point here is not to make yourself feel better in the moment or get to sleep faster. The point is to create more flexible habits of mind so that in the future, when you notice your mind getting sucked back into what went wrong in the past (something you have no control over), you can flexibly adapt and refocus on what you might do in the present and future (something you do have agency and control over).

How to Practice Reframing

In principle, reframing is a simple two-step process:

1. Notice when you’re framing something in an unhelpful way.
2. Reframe it from a more helpful perspective.

In practice, it’s often challenging, in part because our default habits of framing are often defense mechanisms designed to help us avoid emotional pain:

• Blaming others when something goes wrong is often a defense against feeling guilt and shame.
• Catastrophizing about worst-case scenarios is frequently a defense against helplessness.
• Ruminating on the past is a defense against the responsibility of taking ownership over your future.

In other words, we’re often psychologically incentivized to ignore our default framing, which makes it hard to even notice that we’re doing it, much less reframe the situation more productively.

But over the years, both in my work and my work with clients, I’ve found that one of the simplest and most powerful ways to get better at both noticing our default framing and choosing a more helpful reframe is to have names or labels for each.

So, in the rest of this section, I’m going to share a handful of common frame-reframe pairs. Once you have names for these, you’ll have an easier time noticing them and taking action on them. And the more you practice, the easier and more automatic reframing will become.

1. Solving → Validating

Many of us are problem-solvers, both my temperament and also perhaps by profession. Which means we often approach difficult emotional situations—either our own or others—through the lens of problem-solving. And while this is helpful in many situations, it’s surprisingly unhelpful in others.

For example:

• If your spouse had a rough day at work and wants to talk, you analyzing the situation and giving a 5-point recommendation for what he should do about it, might not be super helpful. Instead, you might want to frame it through the lens of validation—What he really needs right now is someone to listen and be supportive.
• If you’re feeling really anxious going into a big presentation at work, your tendency might be to approach your anxiety through a solving frame—What coping skill do I need to make my anxiety go away? Unfortunately, because of emotional fear learning, this approach is likely to make the anxiety worse. Better to approach the anxiety from a frame of validation: I don’t like feeling anxious, but it’s not dangerous. I know it’s just my brain trying to help me. I can do this.

Problem-solving is a wonderful tool. But a lot of smart people get themselves into unnecessary interpersonal conflict (and all the emotional stress that follows) because they over-apply their problem-solving abilities and forget to validate instead.

For more on how to be validating, check out The Emotional Processing Tool Kit →

2. Moral → Mechanical

Often when we’re upset, a big part of our upsetness stems from a story we tell ourselves that someone else has done something morally wrong.

For example:

• You’re annoyed with your coworker because he was late to your planning meeting again which you think is very disrespectful and selfish because he’s basically prioritizing his time over other people’s. That’s the moral frame on him being late: He’s late because he’s selfish.
• But alternatively, you could take a mechanical frame: He’s late again, but I know his manager often runs over time in meetings which could then result in him being late. This is the mechanical frame on him being late: He’s late because of structural factors, not his character.

Now, this doesn’t imply that people are never selfish or that analyzing people’s behavior morally isn’t the right thing to do sometimes. The point is that we often default to interpreting a situation from a moral frame, and very often, a more mechanical frame is both more accurate and more helpful.

So instead of immediately attributing problems to moral failings, try explaining them from a mechanical or structural frame instead.

3. Threat → Challenge

Often we assume that because something feels bad, it is bad or is dangerous. This is especially true of our own emotions.

For example:

• You’re going into an important meeting with a client and you start feeling a little anxious. You find yourself thinking things like: Oh shit… if I get too anxious I might have a panic attack and we could lose the deal. What was that breathing exercise I’m supposed to do to regulate anxiety? In this case, you’re treating your anxiety like a threat. But even though difficult emotions like anxiety feel threatening, they’re perfectly safe, if uncomfortable. And treating them like threats tends to make them more frequent and intense in the long-run.
• Alternatively, you could treat it like a challenge: Okay, I’m feeling anxious. I know that’s just my brain trying to help me. I probably don’t need this much adrenaline for a meeting, but I’ve worked through anxiety like this before and I trust that I can again now.

Obviously, this reframe applies to more than just inner experiences and emotions. But often external experiences are difficult primarily because of the difficult emotions they trigger, which are frequently made worse because our default framing is one of threat, rather than challenge.

Especially if you struggle with anxiety, look for opportunities to reframe threats as challenges.

4. Failure → Feedback

We all make mistakes. But how well we respond to our mistakes often depends on whether we frame them as failures or feedback.

For example:

• Suppose you forget to send some important information to a client, and as a result, they drop you. You feel awful, of course, in part because they were one of your biggest clients and it will have a significant impact on your earnings for the foreseeable future.
• If you frame this mistake exclusively as a failure—How could I have forgotten that?! I’m such an idiot.—you’re much more likely to fall into unproductive mental habits like self-criticism or rumination and all the emotional and behavioral side effects that come with them (shame, helplessness, self-doubt, anxiety, etc).
• On the other hand, if you acknowledge the failure but frame it primarily as feedback and an opportunity for growth—That was a big mistake. But what’s most important is that I figure out a way to make sure I don’t forget to send this type of information again in the future—your response is much more likely to be one characterized by resilience and action rather than emotional overwhelm and stuckness.

Importantly, the failure → feedback reframe doesn’t mean that you’re denying that you made a mistake. In fact, you do acknowledge the mistake. It’s just that you put most of your attention and energy into learning from it rather than beating yourself up for it.

5. Trees → Forest

Often we get stuck in unhelpful mental patterns or overly-negative moods because our attention is myopic and overly focused on some detail while ignoring the bigger picture.

For example:

• You and your partner spend a wonderful day together—you make a delicious breakfast and eat it slowly on the patio, followed by a hike in the park, lunch at your favorite restaurant, and then catch a baseball game in the evening.
• But on the way home, your partner tells you you’re driving too fast and asks you to slow down. You spend the rest of the drive dwelling on this comment, getting progressively more irritated and angry. When your partner asks if you want to stop for ice-cream on the way home you say no because you’re still annoyed. When they ask if you want to watch a movie before bed you say no because you’re still irritated. And when they try to get intimate in bed, you give them the cold shoulder.
• In this case, you’re so focused on this one incident, that you’re letting it exclusively dominate how you think, feel, and behave, and by extension, preventing the many other wonderful things that have happened and might happen from influencing you positively.
• On the other hand, if you were able to zoom out, take a wider perspective, and remind yourself that this was one small negative in a much larger collection of positives, you’d likely have a very different reaction.

Details matter. But so does the big picture.

6. Forest → Trees

While we often make the mistake of missing the forest for the trees, we sometimes make the opposite mistake and get so swept away by the big picture that we miss important details.

For example:

• Suppose you’re a software developer, and on the side of your day job, you’re creating your own software that you hope to eventually build a business around. You’re passionate about software and starting your own business, and yet… You find yourself chronically procrastinating on the project.
• Eventually, you notice the following pattern: you spend a lot of time on “high-level” tasks like drawing diagrams of your future business plan or reading inspiring articles about other technical entrepreneurs, but you seem to be avoiding a handful of hard technical problems with your code.
• One possibility here is that you’re using high-level “work” that feels productive but doesn’t actually move the needle as a way to avoid working on a handful of much more important but difficult details.
• In this case, the reframe might involve, at least temporarily, ignoring many of the big-picture parts of your business, and focusing hard on the few details that are truly holding you back.

To shamelessly mix my metaphors: It’s important to zoom out and see the big picture when you’re stuck in the weeds; but it’s just as important to zoom in and pick a few weeds when you’re stuck admiring the beauty of the forest.

7. Passenger → Driver

It’s easy to frame situations—especially negative ones—from an overly helpless perspective, and as a result, lose sight of the fact that you have quite a bit of agency and influence.

For example:

• On the advice of your doctor, you’ve been working hard through diet and exercise to lose some weight. But on your weekly weigh-in, you realize you’ve actually gained a pound since last week.
• Initially, you frame the situation as if you’re the recipient of an unfair plot: I knew this wouldn’t work… My grandfather was heavy, my dad was heavy, and I’m heavy. It just runs in the family.
• Alternatively, without denying the possibility that you did inherit some factors which make it hard for you to keep off excess weight, you could frame it like this: I’ve been so focused on establishing my new workout routine, that I may have gotten a little lax about my diet, which could easily explain this minor setback.

In the first example, you framed things as completely out of your control. In the second, you framed them as largely under your control. Of course, both framings (plus plenty of other possible framings) have some truth in them. The bigger point is that often it’s more helpful to frame a situation in terms of what you can control rather than what you can’t.

It’s tempting to abdicate responsibility and tell ourselves we’re just a passenger—helpless to the whims of fate, the world, bad luck, or other people’s malice or stupidity. But in almost every situation, you have more influence and control than you realize (or want to admit). Be the driver, not the passenger.

For more on cultivating agency, check out: The High-Agency Mindset →

Notes on Practicing Reframing

As you get started with reframing, a few things to keep in mind:

• You already know how to do it. At least to some degree, this is something all of us do at least some times in some situations. Getting better at reframing largely comes down to A) Remembering to use it, and B) Being willing to use it in difficult or challenging circumstances.
• It takes practice and patience. This might sound obvious, but it’s very important to remind yourself that you will not simply be better at reframing because you read an article about it. The main thing that will drive growth and skill is practice over time, which requires patience.
• Start small. Rather than trying to get better at reframing everywhere and all the time in your life, commit to practicing reframing on one small slice of your life first, then expand as you develop confidence and competence. For example, start by practicing it during moments of frustration with your kids, or anxiety during meetings at work.

Learn More

If you’re interested in learning more about reframing and related topics, here are a few more resources from me:

• The High Agency Mindset
• The 5 Types of Overthinking
• 3 Core Beliefs Keeping You Stuck

The Friendly Mind School

I run an emotional health skills training platform that includes:

• Live classes and workshops
• A resource library full of tools and exercises
• Self-paced courses on topics like chronic anxiety, insomnia, and assertiveness

Learn more about the school here →

Frequently Asked Questions About Reframing

Isn’t all this reframing stuff just self-delusion?

Reframing is not about denying or trying to change reality; it’s about choosing how and what you pay attention to in a way that is maximally helpful.

How can I help other people (like my team at work or my teenage son) get better at reframing?

Externalize your own reframing.

Most people don’t have good models of how to reframe. But we often learn best by observing and imitating people we admire or respect.

For example:

• If you’re on a team meeting at work and you get some bad news about the company’s performance, you might model out loud a failure to feedback reframe: Well, that’s certainly disappointing. Is there anything in last quarter’s results we can learn from for this quarter?
• If you’re baking with your kids and suddenly realize you forgot an ingredient, you might do a tree to forest reframe: Ugh… we forgot to add the chocolate chips. But we still have a dozen very yummy cookies we get to eat and it was fun baking together, right?

Reframes like this can sound a bit silly or simplistic when you say them out loud, but remember that the real lesson isn’t the content of the reframe—it’s watching you do the reframe itself, flexibly changing your perspective on something. That’s the key.

What’s the difference between reframing and cognitive restructuring?

They’re very similar, and they often overlap, but cognitive restructuring is strictly about changing or rescripting the content of your thoughts whereas reframing is a broader concept that might involve some cognitive restructuring but also includes perspective shifting and changing what you choose to pay attention to or focus on.

For example, suppose you get a passive-aggressive text from a family member and the first thing to pop into your mind is: What a jerk!

• You could restructure that thought to be: That message seems passive-aggressive, but maybe I’m misreading it.
• But you could reframe the whole situation by choosing to focus on, say, acknowledging that this particular family member is going through a really hard time right now, and as a result, might not be quite at their best.

If reframing is so powerful, and relatively simple, why don’t more people do it?

I think part of the answer is we’re almost never taught how to do it explicitly. And most of us don’t have a lot of models for it. But a deeper psychological reason is that, as I alluded to earlier, on some level we don’t want to. Reframing always entails assuming agency and responsibility for our own mind. And while there’s a lot of power in that, it’s also just too scary for some people to do because so much of their identity is based on them being at the mercy of external forces, and as a result, not responsible for their life.

What’s your favorite reframe?

Something I use all the time when I’m upset—and encourage my clients to try—is a little framework and series of reframes called The AVA Method, which basically involves a combination of the solving → validating reframe with the trees → forest reframe. You can learn more here: How to Use the AVA Method to Process Difficult Emotions Well →