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We’ve all experienced it-computerized technology that doesn’t function properly. PCs that crash on Monday morning, copiers that melt transparencies, printers that smear ink on Board reports, phones that crackle during crisis calls, Internet viruses that destroy everything but non-essential data, faxes that send documents to the wrong long distance number, and so forth. The list is nearly endless.

Many strategies exist to help you deal with difficult or even "impossible" work situations, including those in which technology seems to have gone awry. Here I present some of the basic principles of psychological self-defense-in particular, mental reframing-to arm you with cognitive tools necessary to live a peaceful coexistence with computerized gadgetry.

Central to the psychological self-help methods presented in this report is the philosophy of First Century C.E. Greek philosopher, Epictetus. According to the ancient Roman and Greek Stoics, it’s not the world that causes you problems; instead, it’s how you look at the world. Even William Shakespeare in Hamlet wrote, "For there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." In other words, life’s difficulties aren’t caused by various "externals"-like bosses, spouses, and malfunctioning "thingamajigs"-but rather by how you evaluate these.

Let’s review how thinking affects life. According to cognitive-behavioral theory (which is an area of psychology concerned with why people think and act the way they do), beliefs, life events, and reactions all interact and affect one another. Of special note is the direct influence that beliefs (thoughts, evaluations, assessments) have on emotions and behaviors. From the perspective of this "Event-Belief-Reaction" model, it’s your interpretations of situations and people that cause you to feel and act the way you do-not the situations or people themselves. For example, the woman who continually believes and tells herself she can’t figure out PCs, soon gets upset about it, berates herself, and then feels like a failure. The more she engages in negative thinking, the more she believes and tells herself she just can’t do it, gets depressed about it, and so on-all of this reinforcing and perpetuating a vicious cycle of frustration, self-pity, and self-defeat.

Also important to keep in mind here is that most of our daily hassles and disappointments come from demanding rather than preferring modes of thinking. People who feel angry, anxious, nervous, irritated, or guilty don’t just desire or prefer something, they usually require, demand, and dictate that they get what they want. As an example, a man might demand that his office computer work perfectly all the time, so he becomes hostile when it doesn’t. Or he might dictate that everything at work be easy and trouble-free, and browbeat himself when the job gets rough.

Indeed, most of the time when people are upset, they’re telling themselves that something is awful or terrible rather than simply inconvenient. Psychologists refer to this process as awfulizing or catastrophizing. Put another way, the catastrophizer might decide he’s a failure because he’s imperfect. Or she might conclude that work is a disaster when electronic gizmos don’t function the way she wants.

Whenever a person believes something in life is disastrous or horrible instead of simply unpleasant or unfortunate, he or she has probably drawn a number of false conclusions, such as: