As a child, if I sat around feeling sorry for myself, my mother would gently rap her knuckles on the top of my head and admonish me. “So selfish,” she would say. “Go clean toilet.” To Mom, who was born and raised in the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau of China, a person should not nurture neurotic thinking or dwell on the tiny things that are wrong in life. This would allow catastrophizing and overgeneralizing to take control.

I would not admit it back then, but my mother was right. Ruminating over petty resentments isn’t at all helpful. Extended cogitating over minor gripes can lead to pessimism and mood disorders. Certainly, bad things do happen—say, a death in the family or losing a job—but that doesn’t mean we need to fall into a negative cycle of self-talk set on phrases such as, “I am so terrible, I lost that job." "I am a failure.”

Psychologist Albert Ellis, the father of rational emotive behavioral therapy........

© Psychology Today