Managing Cognitive Distortions
We’ve been talking a lot about cognitive distortions on our blog recently.
In case you missed it though, a cognitive distortion is a pattern of thinking we have that leads us to believe untrue, negative thoughts. And we’ve covered a lot of them including:
Catastrophizing
Personalization
Jumping to conclusions
Emotional reasoning
Discounting the positive
Filtering
Overgeneralization
Magnification + minimization
Should statements
Magical thinking
Fortune telling
Control fallacies
Fallacy of fairness
Blaming
Fallacy of change
Always being right
Labeling
Looking at them all together can make them seem overwhelming! How are there so many different types of negative thinking patterns and how could we possibly manage to avoid them? The truth is we can’t always avoid negative thinking, and learning to reroute your thinking patterns takes a lot of work. But we can care for ourselves by becoming aware of these patterns, and developing strategies to deal with them when we notice them popping up.
Some things you can do to manage cognitive distortions include:
Sit with the distortion when you notice it:
If you’ve noticed one of the cognitive distortions present in your thinking, don’t just dismiss it as “bad.” While it is important to recognize it as a negative thinking pattern, that doesn’t mean your thoughts should be tossed aside like they don’t matter! Instead, take it as an opportunity to explore the thought.
For example, if you’re falling into the pattern of fortune telling–predicting how people will behave without giving them an opportunity to show you themselves–don’t just tell yourself “you don’t actually know what you’re talking about, you can’t predict how people will behave,” explore why you’re doing that in the first place. Are you protecting yourself from harm? Where did that habit come from? Was it necessary in other relationships to try to anticipate someone else’s behavior for your own safety? How did that habit serve you then? How is it no longer serving you? What is it getting in the way of in your life, or your growth?
Give yourself a chance to understand why these patterns come up for you in the first place.
Hold “trial” for the distortion:
Pretend you are an impartial judge and look at the case your distortion is presenting. Is it convincing? For example: if you’re falling into the pattern of catastrophizing and your boss emails you to let you know they want to schedule a time to meet with you, your mind jumps to the conclusion that “oh my God, I’m going to get fired.” Let yourself have that thought, but don’t take it as fact without examining the evidence. What evidence is there that you would be fired? If it is just the email, that’s not actually enough to make the case for it!
Remind yourself of the shades of gray:
The problem with most cognitive distortions is that they work in extremes. When we forget about the messy middle, it’s easy to jump to the worst case scenario. In reality, it’s unlikely that either the best possible or the worst possible scenario will occur. Usually, we’re somewhere in the middle. When you start to think things like “if this goes wrong, everything will go wrong,” or “everything is riding on this” or “if I can’t do this, I’m a failure” challenge yourself to find one true thing that contradicts the idea that it’s the worst possible scenario to be in.
