Cognitive Distortions – Unhealthy Ways of Thinking

Your emotions, reactions and actions all reflect your thinking. Everything that you feel in any situation is an outcome of how you’re thinking about it. Cognitive theories insist that thoughts cause you to feel sad, depressed, angry, hopeful or any other emotion. To change how you feel, you will need to understand the thought that feeds into the feeling first.

Each one of us are conditioned to react in specific ways to life situations. Some of this is innate, meaning this is not in your control while a larger part of this is acquired, meaning it has developed from how you have learned to react from earlier life experiences.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy pioneer Dr Aaron Beck says that you can learn to control how you think and thereby effectively change how you feel and behave.

Life can be full of negative events and difficult situations, when faced with these do you tend to feel sad, angry, attacked, humiliated, hopeless? Negative events can disillusion anybody!! As human beings, we continue to be influenced by what happens around us. If you become aware of your thoughts, instead of passively identifying with them, you can control your thoughts.

 You are not always misjudging life events, you are not at fault, but you can contribute to your own negative experiences. Since thoughts generate emotions, we need to practice mindfulness with regard to what kind of thoughts we are thinking.

As conscious and intelligent beings, we are forever interpreting the world around us and trying to make sense of things. One way we all primarily do this is by establishing connections between thoughts, ideas, actions, and their consequences.

It is natural human tendency to conserve the use of our brain. We all are biologically wired to use automatic reasoning techniques known as Cognitive Biases to go through our daily existence without excess brain-work.

In other words, Cognitive Biases make our life convenient. However, these connections that the brain makes can sometimes be flawed and these erroneous thinking styles are what are known as Cognitive Distortions.

Cognitive Distortions are twisted thinking styles that are not grounded in logic. We tend to experience these thinking styles spontaneously in response to events and they are rooted in our core beliefs about ourselves, others and the world around us.

Cognitive Distortions are often convoluted versions of reality which maybe inadvertently adopted by people as a reflexive reaction. These distorted thoughts are biased, maladaptive and could lead to feeling negative emotions. So we need to work on identifying which Cognitive Distortions we subscribe to and understand how they are deceiving us.

Let’s take a look at two common cognitive distortions that a lot of us unconsciously and unknowingly maybe subscribing to:

1. Black and White thinking – This is the tendency to think in extremes for example, I am an utter failure or I a brilliant success. This type of thinking keeps us from seeing the world as it often is – constantly changing, uncertain and complex. Black and White thinking does not allow us to find the middle ground. How do you know if you subscribe to this sort of thinking? The best way is to notice yourself talk. Do the following words come up for you more often than not – always, never, everyone, everything etc. These are all absolute words. Thinking in absolute terms is independent of context and unqualified by nuance.
2. Over generalizing – This is a type of cognitive distortion where a person assumes an experience from one event will apply to other events, this happens regardless of whether the circumstances of these events are comparable.
   A common example of over generalizing is when we assume the worst, by viewing one time events as consistent patterns. Another example is when you see smiling faces on peoples social media feed and it becomes easy to suppose that their lives are complete. But the fact of the matter is – this is a curated version of their personal reality and does not indicate their struggles or challenges. Remember, over generalization thrives on incomplete information, thus making reactions and outcomes extreme in nature. In reality over generalization is nothing but unjustified generalizing on the basis of a single incident.