Findings using a new AI-enabled mental health app suggest that reducing negative thoughts lowers negative feelings, supporting CBT and potentially offering quick depression relief.
Modeling shows negative thoughts cause negative feelings—not the other way around.and hopeless. You think “I’ll never be happy. Nothing I do matters.” The more you dwell on these thoughts, the worse you feel.
But what’s really going on? Are your thoughts causing your feelings, or is it the other way around?? A chemical imbalance in the brain? A lack of love and connection? Every school of psychology has its own theory—the list goes on, with hundreds of theories but little conclusive proof. Over 1,700 years ago, the ancient Greek Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, proposed an entirely different theory. He argued that it’s not life events that upset us, but our thoughts about them. This controversial idea became the foundation of, developed by Drs. Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck. CBT suggests that if you change the way you think, you can change the way you feel. It’s a bold and exciting claim—but is it true? With data from a new mental health app, we set out to join the debate.In our first study, we analyzed data from 290 beta testers of the Feeling Great app. Unlike traditional studies that rely on broad, retrospective surveys , our app measured users’ negative thoughts and feelings in the here and now, using new, extremely sensitive scales. This distinction is crucial. By tracking moment-to-moment changes, we could test whether beliefs in negative thoughts actually cause negative feelings—or whether it’s the other way around. Here’s the data on first-time users who successfully reduced their belief in a single distressing negative thought to zero. On average, one-third of the users achieved this goal in just 80 minutes. The impact on negative feelings was remarkable. Figure 1: Change in negative feelings in users who reduced their belief in one negative thought to 0%.As you can see in Figure 1, users who reduced their belief in their negative thought to zero experienced an average 87 percent reduction in seven negative emotions during their first session with the app. But does this result prove that negative thoughts cause negative feelings? No, because it could just as easily be the other way around. Maybe the app changed negative feelings, which then caused the dramatic reduction in negative thoughts.Belief in negative thoughts has robust, direct, and rapid causal effects on negative feelings. Negative feelings do not significantly cause negative thoughts—suggesting emotions are largely a consequence, not a cause, of our negative thoughts.In short, our data strongly supports the central premise of CBT—that thoughts shape emotions far more than emotions shape thoughts. If true, this has profound implications for how we approach mental health treatment.found that over 50 percent of behavioral science studies fail to replicate. This means that even the most promising results often collapse under scrutiny.Interestingly, with the larger sample size, we did detect a small but statistically significant effect of emotions influencing thoughts—but the effect was barely detectable and far weaker than the impact of thoughts on feelings. This suggests that emotions can sometimes influence thoughts, but the effect is minor in comparison to the power of thoughts to shape emotions.Earlier we showed the dramatic changes in negative feelings in users who crushed their negative thought the first time they used the app. But how about those who didn’t completely reduce their belief in their negative thought to zero? As you can see in Figure 2, the degree of emotional improvement in all users correlated precisely with the amount by which their belief in the thought decreased. Figure 2: Reductions in negative thoughts and feelings in all users on the first day that they used the app.The reduction in users’ beliefs in negative thoughts was strongly correlated with reductions in all seven negative emotions. This strongly suggests that reducing belief in distorted negative thoughts may be one of the fastest and most effective methods for relieving not only depression but a wide variety of negative feelings.These findings open exciting new doors for mental health treatment. The data also suggest that many may be able to modify negative feelings rapidly, affordably, and without any human interventions. The rapid changes we observed suggest that many people can find relief from feelings of hopelessness and despair in hours, or days, without years of therapy. The data is promising, but we also recognize that human connection and support will always remain essential. For many, face-to-face therapy will continue to be life-changing—and, in some cases, life-saving. But we have scientific proof that changing how you think really can change how you feel—and that this transformation is possible using an automated digital device., is Adjunct Clinical Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He is a renowned psychiatrist, award-winning researcher, and author ofBeing overly polite might seem kind, but it often leads to problems anyway, in relationships, with friends, and at work.
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