🌿 Overthinking? Meet Byron Katie’s Four Questions and a Better Way to Live
Our brains are like toddlers with glitter — they love making a mess.
That’s why, as a Florida-based Licensed Mental Health Counselor, I love using cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to help clients clean up the chaos of irrational thinking.
But sometimes, even CBT needs a sidekick. That’s where Byron Katie’s Loving What Is (2002) and her deceptively simple Four Questions come in:
Is it true?
Can you absolutely know that it’s true?
How do you react when you believe that thought?
Who would you be without that thought?
The Turnaround: Where the Real Mind-Bending Magic Happens
After you ask Byron Katie’s Four Questions, you don’t just drop the stressful thought — you flip it.
The Turnaround invites you to reverse or reframe the original belief in creative ways, helping you see the situation (and yourself) from entirely new angles.
For example, if the original thought is, “She doesn’t respect me,”
the Turnaround could be:
“I don’t respect me.”
“I don’t respect her.”
“She does respect me.”
You explore each new version with curiosity — not judgment — to find examples where it might also be true.
It’s like reality-check yoga for your brain: flexible, humbling, and surprisingly freeing.
As Byron Katie puts it, “The turnaround is your prescription for happiness.”
In therapy, Turnarounds pair beautifully with cognitive behavioral strategies to help clients challenge thoughts and re-author their story.
It’s basically Marie Kondo for your brain — but instead of decluttering closets, we’re decluttering all the “I'm not good enough” and “everything will implode” thoughts you never needed to store.
Katie writes, "It's not the problem that causes our suffering; it's our thinking about the problem."
(Cue the collective, slightly uncomfortable, but relieved sigh.)
When we combine her approach with classic CBT strategies — challenging distortions like catastrophizing, fortune-telling, and mind-reading — it’s like giving your inner critic a very polite eviction notice.
The benefits?
Less spiraling, more stability.
Less doom-scrolling, more doing.
Less drama, more “I’ve got this.”
Ready to turn down the volume on your inner drama queen (or king)? Therapy might just be your next best plot twist.
👉 Click here to book a session and let’s start cleaning up the mental glitter.