I have selected nine of Albert Ellis' fallacies to kick-start you on a re-evaluation of your personal attitudes and beliefs. I am very fond of Indian Numerology so I tend to round everything off in groups of nine.

I can suggest what others and myself have found helpful to do with these concepts:

	Exercise One: Read over all nine of them every night before going to bed and select one to think about as you are falling asleep. This is not a good idea if you are going to get upset over a particular fallacy and induce insomnia.
	Exercise Two: Write one 'fallacy' in your personal dairy every day and contemplate it throughout the day. See if you can catch yourself indulging in that particular false belief during the day.
	Exercise Three: Every time you realise you are reacting emotionally based on one of the fallacies rationalise it out of your head by reading the part of this article dealing with it and actually state to your self  "I don't have to go on acting as if this attitude or belief is important and true."
	Exercise Four: Photocopy this article and cut out each fallacy with my commentary and take a different one with you each day to take out of your purse or wallet to study at odd moments.
	Exercise Five: Cut out particular fallacies you need to work on and sticky tape them on your bedroom or bathroom mirror - or even the kitchen cupboard in a prominent place. This will remind you to think about and reject the fallacy.
	Exercise Six: This is a graduation technique to really become familiar with the nine fallacies (for those that like the Kabala, you can consider there are 10 - "a closely associated fallacy" could make the 10th).

You can play a psychological version of pick-up sticks, solitaire or in company, by carefully photo-copying the article and cutting up the pages in such a way that Ellis' Fallacies (the one's in quotes) are separated from my commentaries.

You then shuffle the 18 or 20 pieces of paper up in a large mixing bowel and pluck one piece of paper out.

If you pluck out a fallacy try and write a commentary to it based upon your personal experience. Conversely if you pluck out a commentary try to write about or discuss the fallacy associated with it.

Taking these exercises seriously will improve the calibre of your psychological life significantly and I must emphasise that I have seen quite a few hundred patients benefit from these concepts and I have personally found them very helpful.
When these principles of Rational Thinking are applied we can solve the conundrum :

Are we in the prison or is the prison in us?

Albert Ellis PhD, is the Executive Director of the Institute for Rational-Emotive Therapy in New York. He has authored or edited over 50 books including "Sex without Guilt", "Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy" and "How to stubbornly Refuse to make yourself Miserable about anything, Yes anything!"