Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Question the thought
When a thought lands hard, ask whether you know it for certain, and what you would actually put forward if you had to make the case. Then go looking for the bits that point the other way.
Do this once you have settled a little, not in the worst of it, or the questions become another way of arguing with yourself. Write the answers down if you can, because a thought that stays in your head keeps the authority it arrived with. Very often the evidence for turns out thinner than it felt, and the evidence against was there the whole time and simply never got counted.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Do not follow blindly what you do not know to be true: ears, eyes, and heart, you will be questioned about all these (Quran 17:36). Asking what a thought rests on is not doubt, it is the care the verse asks of you.
وَلَا تَقۡفُ مَا لَيۡسَ لَكَ بِهِۦ عِلۡمٌۚ إِنَّ ٱلسَّمۡعَ وَٱلۡبَصَرَ وَٱلۡفُؤَادَ كُلُّ أُوْلَٰٓئِكَ كَانَ عَنۡهُ مَسۡـُٔولࣰ ا
Do not follow blindly what you do not know to be true: ears, eyes, and heart, you will be questioned about all these
Qur’an 17:36read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a study of 55 depressed adults having cognitive therapy, sessions where the therapist asked more of these guided questions were followed by bigger drops in symptoms the week after. That is a pattern observed across real sessions rather than an experiment, so it cannot show the questioning caused the improvement. It is still the closest look anyone has taken at this particular move.
Braun JD, Strunk DR, Sasso KE, Cooper AA. (2015). Therapist use of Socratic questioning predicts session-to-session symptom change in cognitive therapy for depression.. Behaviour research and therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A belief nobody has ever checked gets to keep whatever weight it came in with.
When not to
If the thought is bound up with something that was done to you, this goes better with a therapist than on your own.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Take the thought that is upsetting you and ask: what is another way to read this?
A belief you have carried since childhood will not fall over because you asked it a good question this afternoon. You are planting something, not winning an argument.
Imagine yourself some years from now, well past this, and let that version of you say something to you about today. Write down whatever arrives.