Discounting the Positive: How to Let Good News Count

About this tool

Discounting the positive is the thinking error of registering something good and then stripping it of meaning. The praise was heard, the result arrived, the kind message was read, and within seconds there is a reason none of it counts: they were being polite, the test was easy, anyone would have done the same. David Burns listed it as disqualifying the positive among the ten cognitive distortions in Feeling Good in 1980, and both names describe the same move. What makes it distinctive is the timing. The good part is not missed; it is admitted and then dismissed.

The grammar is almost always yes but. Yes, the client said the work was excellent, but they only saw the final version. Yes, I finished the course, but it was the easy one. Yes, she called to check on me, but she would have done that for anyone. Three standard discounts cover most cases: credit is handed to luck or to other people, the task is reclassified as easy, or the other person's motive is rewritten as politeness or pity. A fourth move raises the bar after the fact, so that whatever was achieved falls just below the line.

It is worth asking what the habit does for the person doing it, because discounting is not pointless. Keeping expectations low protects against disappointment later. Refusing credit avoids any risk of looking arrogant, and in some families and workplaces that risk has been real. Not hoping is a defense against being wrong about hope. There is often a bargain underneath: if nothing good is allowed to count, nothing good can be taken away. The cost is that the protection also blocks the only information that could change how you see yourself.

This is why discounting matters more than its mild appearance suggests. Melanie Fennell's cognitive model of low self-esteem, set out in Overcoming Low Self-Esteem in 1999, describes a bottom line belief about the self, something like I am not good enough, that stays intact because the system of evidence around it is rigged: confirming events are admitted immediately and weighted heavily, while disconfirming events are explained away. Christine Padesky made the same point in 1994 with her image of a prejudice. Someone holding a prejudice does not change it when they meet a counterexample; they treat the counterexample as an exception. A self-prejudice works the same way, and discounting is how the exception is made.

In depression the pattern is part of what keeps the mood self-sustaining, and it is one reason that recovery can be hard to notice from the inside. Beck, Rush, Shaw and Emery described this in their 1979 manual: as mood lifts, good weeks get reclassified as flukes, so the improvement never registers as evidence about the person. Two honest notes belong here. These categories are clinical descriptions, not diagnostic tests, and the research shows that negative thinking travels with depression rather than proving that it causes it. The practical value is not the label but the chance to intervene.

The examples are everywhere once you look. A promotion is put down to nobody else applying. A finished project is dismissed because the deadline slipped by a week. A partner saying they are proud of you is explained as something partners say. Years of steady work are recast as the bare minimum. Recovery from a hard period becomes just the medication, or just time. Each version keeps a verdict safe from a fact that would have complicated it, and each one leaves the person a little flatter than the event warranted.

Discounting the positive is not the same as modesty, and the difference is worth getting right. Modesty is about how credit is presented to others, and in many cultures and families deflecting praise out loud is simply good manners. Accuracy is also not discounting: if a result really did depend on luck, saying so is honest. The question is what happens privately. If the deflection is a social move and you still carry the fact afterwards, nothing is wrong. If the deflection is also the private accounting, so that the fact is deleted rather than filed, that is the distortion at work.

The answer is smaller than people expect. It is not insisting that an achievement was heroic; it is letting it count as exactly what it was. That means separating the fact from the interpretation on paper: what happened, what part of it I contributed, and what the yes but claimed. Then ask the test question: what would have to be true for this to count? The answer is often an impossible standard, such as counting only if it had been difficult, unaided and unacknowledged, and seeing the standard written down does more than any argument about the event itself.

Two practices build on that. The first is the compliment practice: when something good is said, say thank you, add no qualifier, and write the sentence down later as it was spoken, without editing. The second is a running record. Positive Data Log Worksheet is the structured cognitive therapy version, a daily log of small pieces of evidence that fit a fairer belief, and it works because it collects facts at the time rather than asking memory to supply them later. Self-Esteem Journal takes a gentler, narrative form of the same idea.

One honest caution about the usual advice. Repeating flattering statements to yourself is not the same as letting evidence count, and it can backfire. Wood, Perunovic and Lee reported in 2009 that people with low self-esteem who repeated a positive self-statement felt worse afterwards than those who did not, while people with higher self-esteem felt slightly better. The likely reason is that a statement far outside what someone believes invites an internal rebuttal, and the rebuttal wins. Specific, verifiable facts avoid that problem, which is why the sheet below asks for events rather than adjectives.

If good news has not landed for years, the belief doing the discounting is usually older than any of the events it dismisses, and beliefs that old rarely move through self-help alone. A therapist working in cognitive behavioral therapy will test the bottom line directly, set up a data log that runs for weeks, and look at where the standard came from. Persistent low self-esteem, depression, or a sense that nothing you do will ever count are all good reasons to talk with a licensed professional rather than keep arguing with yourself on paper.

Reviewed by Michael Callans, MSW
Checked the distortion against Burns's original wording and Fennell's low self-esteem model, and confirmed the caution about positive self-statements matches the cited study.

References

1. Burns DD. Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. New York: William Morrow; 1980.
2. Beck AT, Rush AJ, Shaw BF, Emery G. Cognitive Therapy of Depression. New York: Guilford Press; 1979.
3. Fennell MJV. Overcoming Low Self-Esteem. London: Robinson; 1999.
4. Padesky CA. Schema change processes in cognitive therapy. Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy. 1994;1(5):267-278.
5. Wood JV, Perunovic WQE, Lee JW. Positive self-statements: power for some, peril for others. Psychological Science. 2009;20(7):860-866.
6. Beck JS. Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Basics and Beyond. 2nd ed. New York: Guilford Press; 2011.

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