THE TOP TEN THOUGHT DISTORTION PATTERNS

  1. ALL OR NOTHING THINKING
    • You see things in extreme or black and white categories.
    • If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.

  2. OVER-GENERALIZATION
    • You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.

  3. MENTAL FILTER
    • You pick out at single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively, thus perceiving the whole situation as negative.

  4. DISQUALIFYING THE POSITIVE
    • You reject positive experiences by insisting they "don't count" for some reason or another. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.

  5. JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS
    • You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.

      • Mind Reading
        • You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don't bother to check this out.
      • Fortune Telling
        • You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already established fact (anticipatory anxiety).

  6. MAGNIFICATION (Catastrophizing) or Minimization:
    • You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof or someone else's achievement).
    • You inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other's imperfections)

  7. EMOTIONAL REASONING
    • You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: "I feel it, therefore it must be true."

  8. SHOULD STATEMENTS
    • You try to motivate yourself with should and shouldn't as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration and resentment.

  9. LABELING AND MISLABELING
    • This is an extreme form of over-generalization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself. "I am a loser". When someone else's behavior bothers you, you attach a negative label to them, "She is a jerk." Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.

  10. PERSONALIZATION
    • You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event, when in fact you did not have primary responsibility.

Adapted from Dr. Beck, Dr. Martin Seligman, Dr. Herb Benson and others.

 

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common thought distortions, restructuring, cognitive restructuring, changing the way you think