Cognitive distortions – sounds very grand doesn’t it? Especially for a very hot day, when perhaps our brains might be feeling a little sluggish. As I write this, it is VERY hot in Glasgow, quite unnaturally so. Lovely if you are on holiday, trickier perhaps if you are trying to work. Distortions in my head are more to do with the heat and working out how much of my normal work I can do outside.
I digress.
I started musing on cognitive distortions in my last blog, talking about emotional reasoning.
What are cognitive distortions?
Simply put, cognitive distortions are errors in our thinking that are negatively biased.
Something happens to us, and we experience a range of thoughts, often automatically. These thoughts then trigger emotional and behavioural responses. If our underlying belief system about ourselves is negative, we can experience neutral or even positive events but our brains still stick a great big negative label on that event. Our behaviour then follows suit with a whole manner of potentially distorted or self-destructive choices that do us no favours at all.
At best, this is exhausting and takes up a huge amount of mental and emotional energy.
At worst, these habitual errors in the way we think about ourselves can cause or perpetuate anxiety, depression, relationship problems and general mental malaise.
I have mused here before about the impact of our thoughts on our behaviour, and tools that can help us make changes.
It all makes a lot of sense.
And it can also feel somewhat overwhelming – I understand that my thinking might be skewed and wonky and causing me to remain stuck in negative thinking loops, but I don’t know where to start to untangle those patterns.
I like breaking things down into manageable chunks. I do this a lot in my work with clients – when you can see more clearly what is going on, it is easier to see where you can start to make changes. As always, our work on ourselves begins with awareness.
Cognitive distortions were first identified and described in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Much of the work of cognitive behavioural therapy is aimed at helping individuals transform their thinking from negative to positive.
Ten common distorted ways of thinking have been identified, and I find it helpful as well as insightful to consider these. They are:
- mindreading
- catastrophising
- all-or-nothing thinking
- emotional reasoning
- labelling
- mental filtering
- overgeneralisation
- personalisation
- ‘should’ statements
- discounting the positive
That’s quite a list.
Which cognitive distortions stand out to you?
Over the next few blogs I will dissect these in more detail. I know that I can relate to them all, and have worked with clients to unpick and re-write all of them at some point. What matters here is that we choose not to go down the route of blame or judgement, but instead to observe kindly and objectively what is going in in our own heads so we can start to make changes.
Over these next weeks, notice your own thinking patterns and what cognitive distortions top your list and see what comes to light.
A free gift to deal with cognitive distortions.
And as a tool to help re-write your thinking, I have a short email course that takes you through simple (but profound) steps to break free of these negative patterns.
Simply sign up HERE: Five steps to breaking the power of negative mindsets.
This is a gift to you from me – but also this is a gift to yourself as you devote a bit of time to your own self development and growth and changing the tape on those cognitive distortions.