The power is not in the stimulus, however, but in how it is mentally appraised: if you change how you think about it, its impact on what you feel and do changes. The tempting chocolate mousse on the restaurant dessert tray loses its allure if you imagine a cockroach just snacked on it in the kitchen. Although Shakespeare’s Hamlet personified tragically unconstructive ways to appraise experience, he made this point insightfully: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
