Feeling Like You're Behind May Be Based on Distorted Beliefs

Key points

Feeling behind is often an example of a cognitive distortion called "emotional reasoning."

Perfectionists often believe they're behind without being able to articulate the meaning of success.

Challenging one's unhelpful and unfair thinking may help ease their excessively high self-oriented standards.

Emotional reasoning is a distorted thinking pattern, meaning that we tend to engage in it automatically and when we don’t want to think too deeply. Normally, we form an interpretation about the outside world and our feelings follow. With emotional reasoning, we interpret the world almost solely based on our feelings — we think, “Because I feel this way, my perspective (which is based on that feeling) must be true. Why else would I have this feeling?” Rather than feelings followi