Cognitive Distortions Twist Your Thiking

As we go through our busy days, we are asked to form spur-of-the-moment opinions about the events around us. Someone says hi? [They want something from me!] Someone fails to say hi? [I have done something to offend them!] Car doesn't start? [This always happens to me!] Late for work? [The world is conspiring against me!]. We all have these scripts inside our heads that help us evaluate things that happen in our lives quickly and efficiently. Unfortunately, not always accurately. 

In the process of coming up with these quick appraisals of events happening in our lives, we often take 'shortcuts' that we hope make the evaluation process quicker. It might. But the shortcuts often take us in directions that are not helpful.

In cognitive psychology, we have grouped these unhelpful shortcuts in categories with labels that describe each one of them. They are called Cognitive Distortions. Dr. David Burns describes them as follows:
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1. All-or-nothing thinking (also known as 'black and white thinking'): You look at things in absolute, black-and-white categories, e.g. "I never do anything right!" (seriously, never ever??)
2. Overgeneralization: You view a negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat, e.g. "I can't make anyone happy" (when you have a fight with your boyfriend, without remembering how much you mean to your best friend!)
3. Mental filter: You dwell on the negatives and ignore the positives, e.g. "I am really bad at sports" (you lose a soccer game, and forget how good you are at indoor cycling).
4. Discounting the positives: You insist that your accomplishments or positive qualities don’t count, e.g. "My good grade in this test was a stroke of luck" (after studying two days for it!).  
5. Jumping to conclusions: You jump to conclusions not warranted by facts. These include mind-reading (assuming that people are reacting negatively to you) and fortune-telling (predicting that things will turn out badly), e.g. "She doesn't like me" or "I know I will not get this job."
6. Magnification or minimization: You blow things way out of proportion or you shrink their importance, e.g., "This is the only important interview I will ever have." 
7. Emotional reasoning: You reason from how you feel: “I feel like an idiot, so I must be one.”
8. “Should” statements: You criticize yourself or other people with “shoulds,” “shouldn’ts,” “musts,” “oughts,” and “have-tos,” e.g., "my life should be way more exciting!"
9. Labeling: You give yourself a label on the forehead. E.g., instead of saying, “I made a mistake,” you tell yourself, “I’m a jerk” or “I’m a loser.”
10. Blame: You blame yourself for something you weren’t entirely responsible for, or you blame other people and overlook ways that you contributed to a problem, e.g., "I am a bad teacher" (when you forget how difficult your students are...) or "They are bad students" (when you fail to analyze your teaching skills beforehand).

We all make these thinking errors on a daily basis. At times, they can go unnoticed. More often, they will lead to feelings of sadness, anger, hopelessness, anxiety and more. The good news is that, with practice, it is easy to identify these distortions and learn how to fix them. Cognitive therapy is just the answer if you are looking to lear more about your thought patterns and how to change them.