What Are Cognitive Distortions?
They’re irrational or overly negative thought patterns. These habitual thinking errors can be crucial in lowering your self-esteem, diminishing your motivation, and contributing to health disorders like substance use, anxiety, and depression. A person with cognitive distortion usually has a negative bias on how they interpret events.
Cognitive Distortions and Negative Thinking
You only have cognitive distortion when harmful thought patterns occur repeatedly. These negative thoughts cause unrealistic and untrue conclusions or distortions of actual reality, hence the term “distortion.” By recognizing and managing your negative thought pattern early on, you’re likely to disrupt this pattern before it deteriorates into a severe mental health crisis.
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10 Common Cognitive Distortions and Negative Thinking
- All-or-Nothing Thinking
Everything you see is in black or white—no grey areas. You only see failure when things aren’t perfect. This could mean you put unreasonable expectations on yourself and others. You might see continual failure because anything less than perfect means failure.
- Overgeneralization
When something happens, you insist it “always” happens to you. When you want a particular thing to happen, and it doesn’t, you keep insisting it “never” happens to you. These upsetting thoughts set up a failure cycle. It can create a lack of action because everything always is against you. Or you might believe that things will always end badly.
- Mental Filter
Besides everything going okay, you pick and focus on one negative detail. Similar to overgeneralization, a mental filter deletes anything good in a situation. All that is left is the negative.
- Discounting the Positive
Feeling unappreciated or inadequate because you ignore good moments. The focus of attention is set on the bad of any situation, and there is little or no room for legitimate good to exist.
- Jumping to Conclusions
You conclude something based on a thought or feeling without any supporting evidence. This reinforces negative thinking because predicting negative outcomes (Fortune Telling) or assuming others have negative thoughts (Mind Reading) can increase anxiety and worry.
- Magnification/Minimization
Using your special magnifying glass to magnify an issue. Or you can minimize the circumstance and your positive attributes. People tend to exaggerate the importance of “bad” situations and ignore or minimize them when things have gone well. This becomes their overall understanding of what usually happens to them.
- Emotional Reasoning
It’s believing that your feelings or emotions are always right. If you feel it, it must be true. The reality is many factors, including fatigue, physical health, past experiences, cognitive biases, etc, can influence emotions. Just because something feels true doesn’t necessarily mean it is true.
- “Should” Statements
This happens when you place unyielding expectations on yourself or others. Since you know how everything “should” be, you blame yourself or others when things take a different turn.
- Labelling
You label yourself negatively once you do something you or others think is unpleasant. You do the same to people surrounding you. With this, an isolated incident can become an identity you assign yourself or to others. You might think because you made a mistake on something, you are now “stupid.”
- Personalization and Blame
Personalization involves seeing oneself as the cause of external adverse events, even when there’s no logical basis for this. For instance, someone might blame themselves for a friend’s misfortune, thinking that the friend wouldn’t be in that situation if they had given different advice or acted differently.
Strategies to Combat Cognitive Distortions & Break the Cycle of Negative Thinking
Combatting Cognitive Distortions and Negative Thinking Fortunately, recognizing and managing cognitive distortions is possible and can significantly impact an individual’s mental health treatment. Here are some strategies:
- Identify the Distorted Thought: Self-awareness of your distortions is crucial to managing them. Recognize that these are distortions and not factual representations of reality.
- Conduct a Cost-Benefit Analysis: Evaluate the impact of the distorted thought and consider the potential benefits of changing the thinking pattern.
- Reframe the Situation: Try to shift your perspective and consider other possible interpretations.
- Consider Therapies: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), mindfulness-based therapies, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) can help detect cognitive distortions and encourage healthier thinking patterns. CBT helps understand the relationship between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, while mindfulness increases awareness of thoughts and feelings without automatic reactions. ACT focuses on accepting thoughts and feelings without judgment and aligning actions with values.
- Seek Medication if Needed: In some cases, medication may be beneficial alongside therapy to manage mental health symptoms, aiding in recognizing and managing cognitive distortions.
- Build a Support System: A reliable support system can help provide an outside perspective, reassure you when distortions arise, and challenge negative or irrational thoughts.
Getting Help for Negativity and Depression
Cognitive distortions and negative thinking don’t have to be the author of your life’s narrative. At Story Wellness in Orange County, CA, we believe everyone can overcome challenges, grow, and create a fulfilling, joyful life story.
We offer comprehensive, evidence-based mental health programs, including Intensive Outpatient Programs (IOP), Outpatient Programs (OP), and Partial Hospitalization Programs (PHP). Our dedicated team of mental health professionals is ready to guide and support you in rewriting your story, replacing negative thought patterns with healthier, more positive narratives.
