There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you if you notice yourself engaging in distorted thinking! Our brains like patterns and shortcuts and simple errors in thoughts are bound to occur now and then. In this article, you’ll learn some of the common cognitive distortions and how you can re-frame them into more helpful, meaningful and realistic thoughts.Įven though cognitive distortions can seem confusing or confronting, it’s important to remember that we all experience them at times. It can be difficult to recognise cognitive distortions and so we tend to believe they are true, which can sometimes fuel anxiety. Clients often find the label of ‘unhelpful thinking styles’ less pejorative than ‘cognitive distortions’ or ‘thinking errors’.Cognitive distortions are inaccurate or false assumptions about ourselves and the world around us. This Unhelpful Thinking Styles information handout gives details of 10 common cognitive distortions. Personalization and blame describe occasions when you conclude – arbitrarily – that what happened was your fault even when you were not responsible.Labeling and mislabeling describe the process of ‘summing up’ ourselves or others by labeling ourselves with tags such as “I am hopeless” or “I am stupid”.“Should” statements reflect our (often unreasonable) standards (“I should do this”, “I must do that”) and frequently lead to feelings of frustration, shame, or guilt.For example feeling hopeless and concluding that a problem is therefore impossible to solve. Emotional reasoning describes the process of taking one’s emotions as evidence of truth.Magnification and minimization describe how we exaggerate imperfections and errors while minimising achievements and strengths.With the ‘mind reading’ variant we assume that other people are thinking negatively about us. With the ‘fortune telling’ variant we imagine and predict that bad things will happen to us. Jumping to conclusions is described by Burns as “arbitrarily jumping to a negative conclusion that is not justified by the facts”.Disqualifying the positive describes the process of dismissing positive information, for example ‘writing off ’ positive events as a ‘fluke’ or saying that they don’t count.Beck described selective abstraction as “the process of focusing on a detail taken out of context, ignoring other more salient features of the situation, and conceptualizing the whole experience on the basis of this element”. Mental filter or selective abstraction describes only paying attention to certain types of evidence.Overgeneralization describes seeing a pattern based on too little data. Burns describes it as the tendency to evaluate one’s personal qualities in extreme black-or-white categories. All-or-nothing thinking describes thinking or acting in extremes.The ten most commonly presented cognitive distortions are: David Burns was an early student of Beck and helped to both expand the original list of cognitive distortions and describe them using accessible language. Techniques such as examining the evidence for and against a thought, or decentering and taking the perspective of a compassionate other are helpful approaches.īeck originally identified five distortions in 1963 and added two additional distortions in his 1979 book Cognitive Therapy of Depression. The cognitive therapy approach is first to identify distorted thinking and then to test or alter distortions using cognitive restructuring techniques. Cognitive therapy proposes that thoughts, feelings, and behavior are inter-related and that changing unhelpful thinking can lead to changes in feelings and behavior. Beck (1963)ĭistorted thinking has been found to be associated with all types of mental health problems: from depression and anxiety to OCD and eating disorders (Beck, Rush, Shaw & Emery, 1979 Clark & Beck, 2010). “ tends to perceive his present, future, and the outside world (the cognitive triad) in a negative way and consequently shows a biased interpretation of his experiences, negative expectancies as to the probable success of anything he undertakes, and a massive amount of self-criticism”. It formed a central part of his cognitive theory of depression, and later, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Aaron Beck first identified distorted thinking in people suffering from depression in the 1960’s. These biases or ‘cognitive distortions’ can have powerful effects upon how we feel. Sometimes we see the world accurately – as it really is – but often our minds take ‘short cuts’ and our thinking can become biased. Our minds are always interpreting the world around us, trying to make sense of events.
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