Resources
Cognitive Distortions
DEFINITIONS OF COGNITIVE DISTORTIONS
- 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 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 experiences.
- JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.
- a. Mind Reading: You imagine that you know what other people are thinking.
- b. The Fortune Teller Error: You imagine that things will turn out badly, and feel convinced that your prediction is an already established fact.
- MAGNIFICATION (CATASTROPHIZING) OR MINIMIZATION: You exaggerate the importance of things (like your goof up or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things (your own good qualities or the other person’s imperfections). Also known as “the binocular trick.”
- EMOTIONAL REASONING: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, 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 do anything. “Must” and “ought” are equal 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!” Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.
- PERSONALIZATION: You see yourself as the cause of some external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.
— David Burns, MD, Feeling Good