Psychologist's Guide to Emotional Well Being

Have you heard of “cognitive distortions” or “maladaptive thoughts?”  These are common information processing errors.  Below is a list of the 10 most common cognitive distortions from David Burn’s The Feeling Good Handbook.  You’ll probably recognize some of these thought patterns, but hopefully you don’t use them often!  They can lead to poor self esteem, hopelessness, helplessness, and depression.

Familiarize yourself with these cognitive distortions and try to recognize them in your own thinking over the next few days.  If you notice a strong tendency to engage in these thinking patterns, please consider buying the book and working through the program!

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

OVERGENERALIZATION: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.

MENTAL FILTER: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors the entire beaker of water.

DISQUALIFYING THE POSITIVE: You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experience.

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.
• The Fortune Teller Error:  You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.

MAGNIFICATION (CATASTROPHIZING) OR MINIMIZATION: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow’s imperfections). This is also called the “binocular trick.”

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

SHOULD STATEMENTS: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn’ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. “Musts” and “oughts” are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.

LABELING AND MISLABELING: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser.” When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: “He’s a louse.” Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.

PERSONALIZATION: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event, which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.

Burns, David.  (1980).  The Feeling Good Handbook, New York:  Harper.  pg. 42-43.

Even though this is an older book, I still find it the most useful in my clinical practice for explaining these concepts and providing tools for changing maladaptive thoughts.