The STUF

Give some thought to the emotion-driven choices you make when you take things personally and consider the value-driven behaviours you’d like to choose in the future. These can include the plans for effective social behaviour we considered earlier.

Examples of value-driven action:

Practice accepting your authentic inner experience, without judgment, before redirecting your attention and behaviour to a productive response that's driven by your values and long-term goals.

Below are some further ways to understand and relate to your feelings and urges:

• Object...

By their nature, social interactions contain a certain degree of ambiguity or uncertainty. Although you can’t control what others think nor actually read their minds, you can make plans for change, practise social behaviour that’s generally effective, and learn to tolerate the uncertainty that co...

• Distinguish your feelings from your thoughts
• Look for signs that you are personalizing or mind reading
• List the evidence for and against your thoughts.
• Consider whether it makes more sense to adopt an alternative account of what happened
• Accept a reasonable am...

Remember that your thoughts may reflect biases in thinking, which is an important starting point. Now is your opportunity to consider the evidence for and against your thoughts, which will help you decide whether to stick with your original understanding of a situation or go with an alternative e...

The next time you’re experiencing a strong or difficult emotion, tune in to your thoughts.

For example, you run into an acquaintance you haven’t seen in a long time, and after a brief and somewhat awkward conversation, you feel a sudden sadness. 

These thoughts might have an even grea...

To help you understand and separate the connections between feelings and thoughts, practise labelling them whenever you have the opportunity.

Remember that feelings are not debatable – you just feel how you feel, even when you wish you didn’t. Your thoughts, on the other ha...

If you tend to take things too personally, it’s important to recognise your patterns of personalisation or mind-reading before deciding what to do with them.

This can be challenging, however, because the line between feelings and thoughts is often blurred. A good way to distinguish feeling...

 If you experience a social setback or can’t get a good read on what another person is thinking, being self-aware can help you pinpoint and correct social problems. But if you resort to personalising or mind-reading whenever there’s a bit of social ambiguity, these well-rehearsed thoughts will st...

The best way to go through the process of gathering evidence is to write down your thoughts.

Get out a sheet of paper. On the left side, write down a brief description of the situation.

On the right side, write down how you felt: ‘sad’ or ‘anxious’ or ‘annoyed’.

To bring more clarity to your thinking about your STUF, here are some good questions to ask yourself. You might find it helpful to write down your answers.

• What does my STUF mean or say about me?
• Do I accept my STUF or criticise myself for it?
• Do I try to distance mysel...

Ask yourself, what’s useful?

Once you’ve had a chance to explore, challenge and revise your thoughts, consider what would be useful for you to know or do now.

So, what’s useful? If you take things too personally because you regularly overlook details that would help ...

If you struggle with taking things too personally, it’s likely that these self-critical thoughts have been rehearsed so often that you don’t even notice them anymore, particularly if you’re wrapped up in the uncomfortable feelings and urges that accompany them.

You can compare these well-l...