<aside> 🎖️ Congratulations on your third week of the journey. In this week, you will learn how to reframe negative thoughts to make them more balanced so that we can redirect them to achieve our goals.

</aside>

<aside> 📎 Table of Content

</aside>

Cognitive Distortions

Last week, you learned common automatic thinking patterns and spent some time observing and recording your thoughts. We introduced some common negative patterns in thoughts—types of thoughts that seem to come up again and again. This is the mental habits—certain ways of thinking—over time.

Some of these mental habits can lead us to consistently interpret situations in unhelpful ways, inconsistent with the facts of a situation, or leave out an important part of the picture. These are known as “cognitive distortions” in psychology. let’s review these 12 most common cognitive distortions in CBT.

• Black-and-white (or all-or-nothing) thinking: I never have anything interesting to say.
• Jumping to conclusions (or mind-reading): The doctor is going to tell me I have cancer.
• Personalization: Our team lost because of me.
• Should-ing and must-ing (using self-critical language that puts a lot of pressure on you): I should be losing weight.
• Mental filter (focusing on the negative, such as the one aspect of a health change that you didn't do well): I am terrible at getting enough sleep.
• Overgeneralization: I'll never find a partner.
• Magnification and minimization (magnifying the negative, minimizing the positive): It was just one healthy meal.
• Fortune-telling: My cholesterol is going to be sky-high.
• Comparison (comparing just one part of your performance or situation to another's, which you don't really know, so that it makes you appear in a negative light): All of my coworkers are happier than me.
• Catastrophizing (combination of fortune-telling and all-or-nothing thinking; blowing things out of proportion): This spot on my skin is probably skin cancer; I'll be dead soon.
• Labeling: I'm just not a healthy person.
• Disqualifying the positive: I answered that well, but it was a lucky guess.

By becoming aware of your cognitive distortions and common patterns, you can begin to challenge them and develop more balanced and realistic thinking patterns, which would be incredibly helpful to your cognitive restructuring practice.

📽️ 9 Cognitive Distortions that can Cause Anxiety and Depression