Cognitive Distortions Flashcards
Learn the common errors in thinking and be alert to avoiding them.
All or Nothing Thinking
“This refers to your tendency to evaluate your personal qualities in extreme, black-or-white categories. All-or-nothing thinking forms the basis for perfectionism. It causes you to fear any mistake or imperfection because you will then see yourself as a complete loser, and you will feel inadequate and worthless. The technical name for this type of perceptual error is ‘dichotomous thinking.’”
Mental filters
“You pick out a negative detail in any situation and dwell on it exclusively, thus perceiving that the whole situation is negative. The technical name for this process is ‘selective abstraction.’”
Disqualifying the Positive
“An even more spectacular mental illusion is the persistent tendency of some depressed individuals to transform neutral or even positive experiences into negative ones. Disqualifying the positive is one of the most destructive forms of cognitive distortion.”
Jumping to Conclusions
“You arbitrarily jump to a negative conclusion that is not justified by the facts of the situation.”
Mind reading
“You make the assumption that other people are looking down on you, and you’re so convinced about this that you don’t even bother to check it out.”
The fortune teller error
“You imagine that something bad is about to happen, and you take this prediction as a fact even though it is unrealistic.”
Magnification
“Magnification commonly occurs when you look at your own errors, fears, or imperfections and exaggerate their importance: ‘My God—I made a mistake. How terrible! How awful! The word will spread like wildfire! My reputation is ruined!’ This has also been called ‘catastrophizing’ because you turn commonplace negative events into nightmarish monsters.”
Emotional Reasoning
“You take your emotions as evidence for the truth. Your logic: ‘I feel like a dud, therefore I am a dud’. This kind of reasoning is misleading because your feelings reflect your thoughts and beliefs.”
Should statements
“You try to motivate yourself by saying, “I should do this” or “I must do that.” The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration and resentment.
Labeling and Mislabeling
“Personal labeling means creating a completely negative self-image based on your errors.
Mislabeling involves describing an event with words that are inaccurate and emotionally heavily loaded.”
Personalization
“This distortion is the mother of guilt! You assume responsibility for a negative event when there is no basis for doing so.”
Overgeneralization is when …
You arbitrarily conclude that one thing that happened to you once will occur over and over again, will multiply like the rabbits. The pain of rejection is generated almost entirely from overgeneralization.
All your moods are created by your
thoughts.
When depressed your thoughts are dominated by a
pervasive negativity.
The negative thoughts that cause your depression nearly always contain
gross, negative cognititive distortions.
