Perhaps one of the ever-present paradoxes of working life is that praise rarely lands where it is intended. Our manager might commend us for excellent work, or a colleague may express genuine gratitude for a helping hand, yet internally, our minds throw us a classic rebuttal: 

They are just being professionally cordial. Anyone else would have done the same. It got the job done, but it wasn’t my best work. 

When we think of the things that trouble us most, we may think of failure, disappointment, conflict, and uncertainty. Yet, a more subtle source of trouble often goes unnoticed until it is brought to our conscious awareness: the typically unconscious habit of not fully accepting the good. For many of us, this habit arises from a desire to appear sensible and modest. However, taken too far, it can create an inner world in which our failures are viewed in high definition, while our successes are hardly seen at all. What is initially intended as humility quietly erodes our ability to register what is actually going well.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) refers to this unconscious habit as "discounting the positive." It is a type of cognitive distortion—an irrational or exaggerated thought pattern—where our brain dismisses or minimizes our accomplishments as insignificant or chalks them up to sheer luck (Beck, 2021).

How do we break such a habit?

Any cognitive distortion, including discounting the positive, cannot be treated with a one-time fix. Just as the habit itself took time to take hold, breaking its grip requires time and conscious effort. In CBT, discounting the positive is viewed as an unhelpful pattern of thinking that can be retrained through repeated, manageable corrective practices. In other words, the goal is less about forcing ourselves to think positively, and more about stopping the invalidation of “good” information.

Here is how CBT-trained clinicians approach breaking the hold of discounting the positive:

Identify Automatic Negative Thoughts

A core tenet of CBT is that you cannot modify what you cannot reliably perceive. Applying that assumption here, we must be able to recognize our automatic negative thoughts before we can address them properly. For a moment, consider the following questions:

• When something goes well, do you immediately shift your attention to what could have been better?
• Do you tend to move on from success much faster than you do from mistakes?
• When someone compliments you, do you find yourself internally brushing it aside?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you are now aware of specific instances in which you discount the positive. In fact, you might even be thinking something along the lines of, “Rats! I totally discounted the positive last week when XYZ happened.” If so, you are thinking about your thoughts, a process known as metacognition. Armed with the knowledge of what it means to discount the positive and the ability to engage in metacognition, you can now take notice of a thought rather than embody it. The next time you find yourself discounting the positive, you can gently tell yourself, “I am doing that thing where I discount the good work.” In doing so, you create distance between yourself and your thoughts. You didn’t just get lucky with that project; rather, you are noticing yourself thinking that you got lucky.

Put an Automatic Negative Thought on Trial

Since our thoughts are mostly opinions or interpretations of events rather than objective facts, CBT recommends putting them on trial against hard evidence. For the sake of this exercise, you will take on the roles of the defense, the prosecution, and the judge.

• As the defense: Write down the hard evidence that corroborates your negative thought.
• As the prosecution: Write down the hard evidence that refutes your negative thought.
• As the judge: Weigh the evidence from both sides and deliver your verdict. Is this negative thought fair and accurate? What alternative explanations could there be?

For many of us, engaging in this exercise helps us recognize that our automatic negative thoughts are, in fact, just one interpretation of an event. It also reminds us that there is often very little hard evidence to support them.

The ultimate goal of placing our automatic negative thoughts on trial is not to replace them with unrealistic optimism. Rather, it is to restore balance to our internal worlds by bringing a bit more curiosity and reason into our thought processes.

Work will likely always be ripe with moments of ambiguity, criticism, and self-doubt. But it can also be ripe with moments of competence, progress, and achievement. In learning to acknowledge and appreciate both sides, we can become more grounded.

Interested in exploring how discounting the positive shows up in your life? Our therapists at Pacific CBT are here to help!

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