The 10 Cognitive Distortions
This is part two of an article on Cognitive Distortions, and part of the course Good Thinking. To read part two, click here.
“Depression is not an emotional disorder at all! How you feel is of no more causal relevance [to depression] than a runny nose is [to having a cold]. Every bad feeling is the result of your distorted negative thinking… Intense negative thinking always accompanies a depressive episode, or any painful emotion for that matter.”
– David D. Burns, M.D., Feeling Good, p.28
Remember: Thoughts are never wrong – they are either helpful or unhelpful. Don’t shame yourself for thinking negatively, but become aware of the fact that problems can be viewed differently, in a way that is more helpful to you and contributes to finding a solution!
Contents
One: All-or-Nothing Thinking
Two: Overgeneralization
Three: Mental Filter
Four: Disqualifying the Positive
Five: Jumping to Conclusions
Recap
One: All-or-Nothing Thinking
The Problem
Also called dichotomous or black-and-white thinking, this refers to your tendency to evaluate your personal qualities and circumstances in extreme, absolute categories. It forms the basis for perfectionism (‘I’m a total failure for missing this deadline.’ or ‘My entire life of hard work is ruined’ when getting a B on an exam as a straight-A student). It causes you to fear any mistake or imperfection because you will then see yourself as a complete loser, having failed yourself, your family, or even everyone around you. As a result you will feel inadequate and worthless constantly, going as far as being demotivated from working entirely.
Evaluating yourself or the world in absolute terms is both unrealistic and unfounded. Finding errors and fault in things by appealing to an absolute standard is self-destructive and a fundamental cause of unhappiness. No one is perfectly happy, no one is completely attractive, and no room is perfectly clean and organized. Conversely, no one is absolutely miserable, no person is completely ugly, and no situation is irredeemably bad. Our world doesn’t allow for perfection and doesn’t deal in absolutes – only in our minds do can we take countless shades of gray and categorize them in black and white.
If you try to hold yourself or your experiences to an absolute standard you can only ever end up discrediting yourself and your life endlessly, reaching for an ideality that can never become your reality, because whatever you do and whatever happens in your life will never meet your exaggerated expectations.
The Solution
Understand that imperfections do and will exist in every person, in every situation, and in every attempt you will ever make at anything you want to achieve. Understand the difference between idealistic and realistic expectations, and become aware of your thoughts often falling into the former category, rather than the latter. Try to change things you want to see changed in yourself or your life more broadly, but only after accepting that things currently are as they are, and that things that happened in the past (even in the immediate past) have already happened, and feeling regret over it will not change the situation nor help you change it.
Place your negative cognitions (N.C.’s) in perspective, and realize that they are necessarily not as grim as you make them out to be. In doing so you will allow room for acceptance of what is, and find more clarity and peace of mind to find possible solutions to your problem and change what will be in the future.
Example N.C.: “I completely botched that presentation. I will never become successful as a public speaker. I am worthless.”
Example P.C.: “I made quite a few errors in that presentation. To prevent the same thing from happening of the future, I can now analyze these mistakes and learn from them. ‘If at first you don’t succeed, fail, fail again.’”
Two: Overgeneralization
The Problem
Overgeneralizing means you arbitrarily conclude that one thing that happened to you will occur over and over again, or has been happening over and over again. It also means that you will unfairly assume that a person will repeat something they did more often in the future. Since these things invariably pertain to things that are negative for you, you will feel upset, and anticipating more reason to be upset, you will become even more upset.
You will start extrapolating these events to other events (‘Why do these bad things always happen to me?’) and even other people (‘All men are untrustworthy.’). This will cause you to not only exaggerate the frequency with which these things happen to you, but also cause you to feel more strongly about them when they do happen (‘See? I told you they were all out to get me!’), or even cause these things to happen (e.g., a woman fresh out of an abusive relation has learned to think of all men of abusive, meaning she might be more tolerant of abuse at the hands of her next partner, because it meets her expectations for what all men do).
Generalization is a necessary tool for processing all the information our brains take in every day, and is generally a benefit to your mental well-being. The more you can generalize, the more heuristics your brain can use, the less straining a situation becomes. The problem with overgeneralization isn’t just the incorrectness of these generalizations, but the way too broad extent of your generalization and the emotional impact of having these thoughts.
When first you overgeneralize a trivial situation (for instance, dropping your cup of coffee on a particularly stressful morning, and thinking ‘Why am I always such a damned klutz?’), you’re establishing a dangerous precedent not just for a future repeating and amplification of that situation (‘Why can’t I do something as basic as holding a damn coffee cup? Geez!’), but also things that evoke a similar feeling (for example, imagine your being late for work after having to clean up that coffee cup, thinking ‘A klutz and a failure!’ as your boss starts yelling at you).
In the end, none of this is even remotely fair or realistic!
The Solution
Stop making such harsh and rash judgments, especially when doing so only causes you to feel bad! Understand that no small number of things that happen, and especially a single negative event on a bad day, is indicative of anything larger than ‘what just happened, happened’! See these situations for what for the isolated events that they are. Don’t allow yourself to make them bigger than that, and don’t allow these events to make you feel any worse than you’re already feeling.
When trying to overcome jealousy or rejection, which is fundamentally a self-esteem issue of which overgeneralization and black-and-white thinking are always at the root, it is important to understand that not only is the rejection you’re most fearing not permanent (i.e. not general over time), meaning that a rejection by a single person now doesn’t necessarily mean he or she will always reject you, but it’s also not general across people, meaning that one person’s rejection does not mean that other people will also reject you in the same way. There is simply no reason to believe this, nor is there any use in doing so.
Example N.C.: “My co-worker is rude and abrasive to me, and that’s just how it goes. People just always seem to find a reason to be annoyed by me.”
Example P.C.: “My co-worker was rude and abrasive to me. I didn’t deserved that, so I’m sure he had his own reasons – probably a bad day or something. If it continues, I’ll have to step up and say something, but I’m sure that won’t be necessary.”
Three: Mental Filter
The Problem
Also called ‘selective abstraction’, when your mental filter is active you tend to pick any negative detail of an event or person and dwell on it incessantly, and by making the focus something entirely negative you end up contaminating the entire event or person.
By shifting your focus to a negative aspect, or even conjuring one because your mood or state of mind compells you to, you end up with an entirely negative perspective that can chronically devastate your mood. Good things become bad, bad things become unbearable.
By not being aware of this ‘filtering process’ that blocks out the positive aspects of an event (‘I got an A+, sure, but I still made 17 errors, which just shouldn’t happen.’) or person (‘Sure, this guy is great and he obviously likes me, but he’s too richer — he’s bound to find someone prettier.’), you end up with a mindset that doesn’t allow for anything positive in your life, leaving you in a cycle that is not as much vicious as it is inescapable. You’ll conclude that everything is negative, adding to the belief that things are generally bad (see Two).
The Solution
Only noticing the negative aspects of a situation that can be almost entirely positive is a matter of attention first and foremost. To overcome it, you can list the all the good and bad things about a situation or a person and award scores to each thing listed. In doing so, you are accomplishing two things:
To make this work, force yourself to look at the good things, or even invent good things to fill up your list. This distracts you from the bad things and makes you more attuned to finding the good.
By awarding an arbitrary number to each good and bad attribute of this sum, you are forcing your brain to both accept and properly credit the positive. As seen in the game of life, simply crediting something is enough to have it effect change in your way of thinking.
You can also rethink each individual bad part, neutralizing them, or you can simply distract yourself by focusing in on the good things. If you choose the latter option, make sure not to try to block out the bad thought, but simply let it be and prioritize consciously thinking about the good over the bad.
Example N.C.: “This girl wasn’t very enthusiastic when she said goodbye. She basically ignored me. She must not like me at all, or be embarrassed about being seen with me. She’s never like this when we’re alone.”
Example P.C.: “She was very lively in the conversation we just had. She was very happy about seeing me, brief as it was. And since she was very energetic and really needed to get that energy out of her system, I can see her being a bit distracted as she went away. After all, if she really didn’t like me, why would she be happy to stay as long as she did?”
Four: Disqualifying the Positive
The Problem
Far more wretched and damaging than just a negative Mental Filter, disqualifying the positive is a persistent tendency to take neutral or positive aspects of something and warp it into something negative. This distortion doesn’t just make you ignore the positive, it enables you to take even the most blessed experiences and turn them into a mental hell. As David D. Burns puts it, you become a psychological alchemist capable of ‘transforming golden joy into emotional lead.’
For every negative assumption you can make about yourself, e.g. ‘I am worthless’ or ‘I am incompetent,’ you are already quite capable of your attention to facts that confirm those assumptions, and favor those facts over facts that refute those assumptions. When your mental filter focuses in on these negative facts, it can be enough to simply divert your attention to the positive ones. But what happens when you teach yourself to cleverly turn all those positive things into negative ones? You end up with a depressive mindset that can turn even the most soothing thoughts into the most paining punishments.
For instance, suppose you just got fired from your job. The statement ”I am a failure.” is on replay inside your head, and every negative point only serves to reinforce it, e.g. ‘Without this job I lost my chance at a successful career,’ ‘I just threw away ten years of my life’ or ‘My parents will be so disappointed in me.’ Your friends come over and list some positive things in an attempt to console you, like ‘This gives you a chance to explore other career opportunities,’ ‘Your boss always had it out for you, so now you can find a more pleasant welcoming workplace,’ and ‘You were the most successful marketer they had.’
Which all are reasons to feel at least a bit of relief in being freed from that hostile work environment. But, as a skilled self-persuader with a spiteful agenda, you manage to refute each and everyone of these arguments. ‘Explore other career opportunities, so I can fail at those at well? That is, if I even get a chance to fail horribly at them, which I’m sure I will.’ ‘If my boss had it out for me, that’s completely my fault. If I had been likable I’m sure I wouldn’t have so easily be replaced.’ ‘I was top salesman and I was still let go just like that. Only goes to show how horrible I am to work with.’
Even Aristotle couldn’t argue his way out of that level of misery.
The Solution
Stop being so needlessly cruel! Seriously. No situation is irredeemably bad! The situation isn’t the problem – ever! In our previous example, you could have been let off with a full early retirement and that still wouldn’t have been enough for you to stop beating yourself up about it. If you manage to convince yourself that there is nothing positive worth considering about a situation, even those things that are unmistakably positive, then you are being needlessly cruel to yourself. Not only are your thoughts extremely harmful, they are completely dishonest. You are lying to yourself.
You don’t even need to deny or ignore the negative aspects of something, but you shouldn’t let them hurt you, either, and you definitely should not be ignoring the positive alternative explanations that are equally valid, if not more so. Even when the list of negative things seems so vast that you don’t believe there is a way to talk yourself out of believing that something is beyond hope, who are you helping by rejecting the positive things that are equally real?
Example N.C.: “That was a complete mess. Stuttering constantly and failing at something as simple as small talk, it just turned into the most embarrassing show ever. And she could see my embarrassment, which possibly makes it even worse. I should just give up at even trying to be sociable. The fact that I got dressed up and walked behaved up until that point only serves to show what a fake I am.”
Example P.C.: “Well, I was looking quite sharp, and I think I can forgive myself the occasional screw-up. I at least got her to laugh, so at least one of us got some fun out of it. Even the smoothest talkers stumble at some point, and hey, maybe she’ll think I just stumble over my words when talking to her. Really, that’s kind of a compliment. Plus, if I try better next time, we can even poke fun at it together. Persistence is key, and I have that in abundance.”
Five: Jumping to Conclusions
The Problem
You tend tend to jump to negative conclusions that are not justified by the facts of the situation. You fill in gaps, and no matter how good you believe your reasons to be, you conclude something from a point of uncertainty and nearly always to your own detriment. There are two primary examples of this:
Mind reading: Making an assumption about the intent, beliefs or opinions of someone else, without bothering to verify with that person of whether or not your own assumption is correct.
Fortune telling: You predict the outcome of a decision or the occurrence of a future event, which is ultimately a miserable prospect that leads to more misery now, whether or not it will actually come to pass. You imagine something bad to happen and take this prediction is fact (and suffer the emotional consequences as if it had already happened) even though it is not based in reality at all.
By trying to predict the opinions or behaviors of another person, you are causing unnecessary tension and influencing your own mood and behavior negatively. This in turn leads to strained communication on your part, or evasion of the other person, leading good events being avoided for risk of things ending badly. Invariably, these will strain the relationship and your own mood further, leading to a vicious cycle of negativity that completely fabricated by your own unwanted thoughts. By imagining a bad outcome to a future event or an undertaking you’re considering, you will create an aversion to experiencing that event and try to avoid it, even though your expectation of failure or disaster is completely unrealistic.
In both these cases you are preventing yourself from finding out whether you are actually right in your assumptions (note: you never are), and so you can do nothing to rid yourself of a mental anguish that is undoubtedly much more severe than the discomfort you would feel if your imagined threat turned out to be real after all.
Some examples of Mind Reading:
It’s your first day working a new job, and a new co-worker is particularly abrasive and rude to you. You think to yourself, ‘He must not like me at all.’
While giving an excellent presentation, you see someone in the front row who is yawning and falls fast asleep a few minutes after. You tell yourself, ‘This audience thinks I’m uninteresting. They are bored out of their minds.’
You meet a friend at a gym you both go to, and when you finish your work-out routine together he leaves without so much as a word of goodbye. You conclude, ‘He must not like me much anymore.’ Afterwards, your friend doesn’t respond to any of your various Facebook messages during the weekend. You now fully resign to the ‘fact’ that he must not want to talk to you anymore.
None of these claims have any solid basis for believing them (and if they did, they still wouldn’t need to be a problem), but you still might suffer the consequences of thinking them. Stress, feelings of worthlessness, or being offended. You might respond by ignoring the person, withdrawing yourself from communicating with them and meeting them, or by launching a counterattack. Because of this, your self-defeating behavior- and thought pattern might become a self-fulfilling prophecy and create tension and negativity in a relationship without any proper justification. This is often the illusory cause of jealousy and mistrust.
Some examples of Fortune Telling:
Panic attacks work much in the same way. You tell yourself ‘I’m going to pass out or go crazy,’ and even though it is impossible to actually pass out during a panic attack, you inadvertently cause your panic attack to occur, while nothing would be amiss if you hadn’t worried about getting in a worrisome situation in the first place. Additionally, these predictions are unrealistic because you’ve probably never gone ‘crazy’ once in your life – so how could you possibly have just cause to make that prediction?
Depressed people often make the prediction that they will not improve, and the resulting hopelessness and stress will serve to worsen their emotional state and ‘confirm’ their suspicion. However, during therapy they will often improve regardless of whether or not they change that belief, indicating that the belief is completely unfounded. Getting that insight plays a major role in recovery from any type of emotional or anxiety disorder.
The Solution
First of, most of your assumptions are simply wrong. Further, the validity of your own assumptions isn’t even important to the situation at hand, and isn’t conducive to feeling good about that situation. So if you are going to make a prediction, make sure it is both positive (to feel good about it) and without expecting a certain positive thing (to not get hung by disappointment).
If you find yourself jumping to these conclusions, realize that as much as they might seem real in your head, there is nothing realistic about them, and continuing to convince yourself otherwise from that point on is a choice that you can decide against.
As a final example, take the situation described earlier, where your friend didn’t respond to your texts after he hastily ‘abandoned’ you at the gym:
Example N.C.: “He doesn’t want to talk to me. I best not message him anymore, as he’ll just think I’m obnoxious or pushy if I keep bothering him. I’ll only make a fool of myself. I best avoid him from now on.”
Example P.C.: ”He is probably busy. If he can’t respond right now, that’s fine. I could probably send him another message to see if he got around to reading my other message, and then I best leave it at him. I don’t know what’s going on in his life right now, he could just be busy for all I know. I will get an answer eventually.”
A few days later, your friend texts you back saying that he was away for the weekend and his phone wasn’t responsive when trying to text back. All the worry you could have had would’ve been completely pointless!
Recap
1. All-or-Nothing Thinking: Categorizing things in absolute terms, as either entirely good or entirely bad. When you or your experience fall short of your ideals, you consider it an abject failure.
Correct this distortion by becoming aware of the ideal that you are comparing yourself or your experience to. Imperfections are a fact of life, and trying to get around that fact is self-destructive, and counterproductive to changing things for the better.
2. Overgeneralization: You take a single negative event or behavior and extrapolate it to other events and behaviors across time (this always happens) and across people (everyone does this). You overestimate the frequency and the emotional severity of normal occurrences.
Correct this distortion by isolating that event or behavior and treating it as an incident. Use that awareness to prevent occurrences in the future, but don’t assume that future occurrences are inevitable and unavoidable – they aren’t.
3. Mental Filter: You pick out one or a few negative details and focus exclusively on those. You ignore the positive details, preventing them from weighing in emotionally in your evaluation of your experience.
Correct this distortion by placing these negative details in perspective. They are part of a vast amount of details, most of which are neutral and positive. Divert your attention to these positive things, and prioritize them over the negative ones. If necessary, make a list of all positive, neutral and negative details and value them with arbitrary scores.
4. Disqualifying the Positive: You reject the positive details entirely and insist that they ‘don’t count’ in your experience, or even transform them into something negative entirely. In doing so you can maintain self-destructive beliefs even when they don’t conform to your day-to-day reality.
Correct this distortion by accepting the positive things as well. Resist your urge to waiver the positive things or transform them into something worse. Valuing things positive or negative is a mental process, and whether or not you decide to accept positive things or interpret things in a positive light is under your direct control.
5. Jumping to Conclusions: You make negative assumptions based on baseless (mis)interpretations of your experiences. You do this while there is no definitive evidence that supports your conclusions and the severity of those conclusions.
Correct this distortion by reserving judgment and fact-checking. If you think something is off, confirm it! And, when you notice that you were unreasonably quick to judge or assume, acknowledge it! Only by becoming aware of your rash, unfair and unreasonably negative assumptions can you prevent yourself from causing yourself more unnecessary pain and stress in the future!
Remember: Thoughts create emotions, and so how you feel about your experiencies is determined only by how you choose to look at them!
Also remember: Resist the urge to defend yourself! You don’t have to convince anyone that you’re right or justified in feeling how you feel. Of course you are! Your feelings are your feelings, and they can never be wrong! However, since you are right regardless of whether you feel good or bad about something, you have to ask yourself only the question: Is thinking and feeling this way helpful or unhelpful!
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Thanks for reading, and best of luck in becoming a better you!