It is not a goal of this program to replace your grey-coloured glasses with rose-coloured glasses. It would be far from adaptive to focus on the beautiful sunny day in your car while a train is barreling towards you sounding its horn and whistle. The goal of this program is to replace the grey-coloured lenses with clear lenses so that you can react to situations based on all the information you have available, not just a fragment of it.
Now because you might have been wearing your particular lenses for so long, you might not even realize that you’re wearing them or what kind they might be. The downward arrow technique can help you find this out. It involves identifying an automatic reaction to a situation and then asking yourself the following series of questions: “What’s so bad about that if it were true?” What does it mean about me as a person or my future if it were true?” Essentially you’re asking yourself, “So what?” until you find that you keep coming up with the same answer. If you do this often enough, across a variety of situations, you’ll find that you keep coming to the same “so what” and then you’ll have an idea of the lens through which you’re seeing the world.