Two more cognitive fallacies for your Thursday! 📚
-Catastrophizing- you might inflate the meaning of certain events and create a catastrophe or crisis that doesn’t exist. For example, you’re worried you will fail an exam. ✏️ You jump to the conclusion that failing an exam would be the worst thing to happen, that failing the exam, would mean you would never get the job you want, the life you want, etc. The reality is that many people who have failed an exam before get the jobs they want, succeed in life... myself included. 😅
-Personalization- This is where you believe that everything others do or say is some kind of direct, personal reaction to you. A person engaging in personalization may see themselves as the cause of some external event that they were not responsible for. For example, if a friend gets a ticket for speeding on the way to see you 🚔, you might feel as though your friend getting the ticket was your fault- although it was your friend’s choice to speed.
Anyone experience these two? I can think of lots of examples from my own life- I think I am especially guilty of catastrophizing!!
Two more cognitive distortions for today 🎉!
-Overgeneralization- This is where we come to a big conclusion based on a single piece of evidence. Something bad may only happen once, but we expect it to happen over and over again. An example of this might be if someone were to go on a bad online date 💕- maybe they believe alllll online dating is bad and avoid ever using a dating app again.
-Mind reading- 🔮This one is common with people experiencing social anxiety and other fears too! This is where we feel like we know or can predict what others might be thinking, feeling, or why they’re behaving in a certain way with no evidence to suggest that this is true. I hear this all the time with statements like “my friends are avoiding me” or “everyone thinks I’m weird”.
Are you guilty of any of these distortions? I know I am! Please share!
Awesome anxiety art by #annaborges
Today I want to talk about cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). In specific, cognitive distortions. I talk a lot about identifying and challenging our thoughts, and cognitive distortions are a way to categorize our thoughts.
Cognitive distortions are essentially ways that our mind 🧠 convinces us of something that isn’t really true.
I’m going to go through a bunch of these over the next few weeks- let’s start with these two:
-Filtering- Filtering is when we take only negative details into consideration and filter out all positive aspects. For instance, if I said, “Driving is the worst!!! I hate everything about driving, the traffic, bad drivers, my commute...” 🚗 😤 I might be forgetting how much I enjoy sitting in my warm car and listening to podcasts👂🏻. I might also be forgetting how much I didn’t like riding the bus!
-Black and White Thinking- This is where we think in concretes- we’re perfect or we’re a failure. People are good 👍 or they are bad 👎. There’s no middle ground! When you place people or situations in “either/or” categories, with no shades of gray 🌫, you’re not allowing for the complexity of most people and situations. You hear this one so often in couples therapy, “They never wash the dishes!”, “I always do everything around the house!”. My black and white thinking alarm bells 🚨 go off every time I hear the word “always” ...wait, was that black and white thinking?? 😂
We’re all guilty of these from time to time, as you can see. Any one want to share another example?
