It is common to experience negative thoughts day to day, but when these thought patterns, also known as cognitive distortions, are persistent, they can interfere with your daily life and contribute to mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety.
What are cognitive distortions?
According to the American Psychological Association, a cognitive distortion is an inaccurate way of thinking. This is a fairly typical mental process that occurs in all people to varying degrees.
The brain creates these mental filters as shortcuts to reduce the burden of processing lots of information at once. However, this can cause oversimplifications of complex thoughts, which can make a person feel badly about themselves.
Learning to identify cognitive distortions can help a person reframe their thinking and improve their mood.
Types of cognitive distortions
By understanding the structure of cognitive distortions, a person can better identify them in their thought patterns.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Aaron Beck and others conducted research that led to the creation of the common therapy method cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and determined that at least 10 types of cognitive distortions exist:
- Labeling: This is a reaction in which someone classifies themselves in an entirely negative way, sometimes but not always in the aftermath of an unsuccessful life event. For example, they reduce themselves to a “failure” after getting a rejection from a job application.
- Discounting the positive: A person will discount and reduce any positive event in their life, chalking it up to luck or labeling it unimportant.
- Mental filtering: This is a thought pattern that lingers and focuses on negative events or thoughts, even in the face of contradictory information.
- Emotional reasoning: A person with emotional reasoning will allow their emotions to dictate what they believe as truth, without paying attention to the facts in front of them.
- Mindreading: This cognitive distortion leads people to assume that other people have negative thoughts about them, even though they may not.
- Catastrophizing: A person who catastrophizes will dread the future, predicting negative outcomes despite having no evidence to suggest that those outcomes are possible or likely.
- Overgeneralizing: This distortion involves assuming that one negative event means all future events will have negative outcomes.
- Personalization: A person with this distortion believes that all negative events are their fault in some way.]
- “Should” statements: A person may always think that they could have or must have done things in a particular way in the past, even though they did not have all the information to know how to act.
- All-or-nothing thinking: This involves viewing everything as black and white or either-or, without considering the details of a situation.
Causes and triggers
Cognitive distortions can be an expression of a person’s preexisting internal biases. These negatively skewed thoughts are likely to increase a person’s likelihood of depression and lead to negative behavioral responses.
How to change distortions
To treat and manage cognitive distortions, a person has to learn to restructure their thought patterns and responses to stimuli. While this is difficult, with commitment, it is possible to change cognitive distortions.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a type of talk therapy that works to highlight the inaccuracy of cognitive distortions for the situations in which they occur and how they affect mood and behavior. It also incorporates two other important aspects of mental health:
Underlying beliefs: These shape how a person interprets events and processes information. They include both core beliefs, such as “I am unlovable,” and intermediate beliefs, such as “To be accepted, I should please others all the time.”
Automatic thoughts: Addressing this aspect helps change a person’s immediate response to a stimulus. For example, if someone does not say hello to them, a person could interpret this as “They are in a rush” instead of “They hate me.”
Excerpted from “What are cognitive distortions? in MedicalNewsToday. Read the full article online.
Source: MedicalNewsToday | What are cognitive distortions?, https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/cognitive-distortions | © 2024 Healthline Media UK Ltd. Last medically reviewed in November 2023
If you are struggling with cognitive distortions, caring therapists can help you challenge and change unhelpful ways of thinking. CHC is here to help. Call, email or book a phone call with our CHC Care Team to get started.
