Common Cognitive Distortions
1. 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.
2. Overgeneralization: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of
defeat.
3. 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 discolours
the entire beaker of water.
4. 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 experiences.
5. Jumping to Conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are
no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.
a. Mind Reading: You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and
you don't bother to check this out.
b. The Fortune Teller Error: You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel
convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.
6. 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."
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's and shouldn'ts, as if
you have 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.
9. Labelling and Mislabelling: This is an extreme form of overgeneralisation. Instead of
describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: "I'm a loser." When
someone else's behaviour rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: "He's
a louse." Mislabelling involves describing an event with language that is highly coloured
and emotionally loaded.
10. Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which
in fact you were not primarily responsible for.
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