You will be able to reappraise a stressful event by generating other plausible explanations for it.
Picture two people on the same Monday call when a colleague unmutes and talks over them. The first thinks, "he's dismissing me in front of the client", and spends the hour angry. The second thinks, "he's clearly panicking about something", and feels a flicker of irritation that is gone by lunch. Same call, same interruption, very different days.
The difference is the story each of them told. Lesson 2.2, Find the situations, people and stories that set you off, showed that a quick story usually sits between an event and your feeling about it. This lesson is about changing that story on purpose.
Reappraisal means changing how you interpret an event so that the feeling that follows changes too. It works at the fourth stage of James Gross's process model from lesson 3.1, Why bottling it up tends to backfire, which is before the feeling has fully built. That timing is why it tends to cost less than suppression. You are not holding back a reaction. You are changing what you are reacting to.
Of all the regulation strategies, reappraisal has some of the most research behind it, much of it from Gross and colleagues. In their studies, people who habitually reappraise tend to report more positive emotion and better relationships than people who habitually suppress. Like any finding about habits, it describes a tendency across groups, not a promise about any one person. It is still a good reason to practise.
The simplest way in is one question: what else could explain this, besides the worst version?
The worst version arrives on its own. Your job is to generate the others. Aim for at least three, and make them specific to the person and the situation, not generic.
Arif tried this with his Monday entry from lesson 2.4, Keep a trigger log for one week. The event: Jason unmuted and talked over his update to raise a vendor issue. The original story: he thinks my updates don't matter.
Here are the three alternatives Arif wrote. First, Jason had a call from the vendor just before the meeting and was worried it would be forgotten if he waited. Second, on video calls with a slight delay, Jason may not have realised Arif was still speaking. Third, Jason interrupts most people, and Arif had only noticed when it happened to him.
Then he checked each one against what he knew. The vendor issue was real; Jason had mentioned it in the team chat at 9.40. The delay was plausible, because two people had complained about lag that week. And when Arif watched the next stand-up, Jason talked over Priya and Grace as well. None of this made the interruption acceptable. But "he thinks my updates don't matter" no longer looked like the most likely explanation, and the anger dropped from a 6 to something closer to a 3.
Reappraisal gets confused with positive thinking, and the difference matters. Telling yourself "it's fine, everything happens for a reason" when you do not believe it is a kind of suppression with a smile on top. It does not change the feeling, because the feeling is still responding to the story you actually believe.
The alternative explanations have to be believable to you. If you cannot imagine yourself accepting one, cross it out and try another. Sometimes, after honest checking, the worst version turns out to be true. Some colleagues really do take credit, and some managers really do plan badly. Reappraisal does not ask you to deny that. It asks you to check first, so that when you do raise a problem, you are raising the real one.
Even when the event is as bad as you thought, you can often reappraise what it means for you. "Grace changes priorities on Friday because she plans badly" might be true. "So my weekend is gone and nothing will change" is a second story, and that one is open to question. Arif could raise the pattern with her, which module 6 prepares you for.
One common and practical use of reappraisal is about your body, not other people. Before a presentation or a tough meeting, your heart races, your hands get clammy and your stomach churns. Most people read those signs as fear, and the fear grows.
The same physical state also comes with excitement. Your body is getting ready to perform. Alison Wood Brooks, a researcher at Harvard Business School, ran experiments in which people about to do stressful tasks, such as giving a short speech, were asked to say either "I am calm" or "I am excited". Those told to say they were excited tended to perform better and feel more excited. Trying to calm down from a high-energy state is hard. Relabelling the energy as readiness is often easier.
Arif uses a version of this before client calls now. When his heart speeds up, he tells himself it means he is ready, rather than trying to make it stop.
Reappraisal is hard to do for the first time in the middle of a tense moment. It gets easier when you have already done it on paper for the situations that come up again and again, because the alternative stories are ready when you need them.
In the activity below you take one entry from your trigger log and write three other plausible explanations for what the other person did, then check each one against what you actually know.
Take one entry from your trigger log and write three other plausible explanations for what the other person did.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).