Download Cognitive Distortion Notes and Worksheet and more Exercises Cognitive Development in PDF only on Docsity!
Cognitive Distortions
People experiencing depression, anxiety, and other mental health disorders tend to have unhealthy thinking patterns that are overly pessimistic. Everyone experiences negative thoughts, but when they become more frequent and/or stronger, they can create problems: (1) They can make us feel bad. (2) They are often exaggerated or inaccurate. (3) We tend to believe them without actually considering whether or not they are accurate. Seeing oneself as a hopeless or bad person or feeling responsible whenever something goes wrong are examples of exaggerated, negative thoughts. Negative thoughts:
- affect our feelings
- change our behaviors
- are usually not true or only minimally true, although we tend to believe them anyway
- can lead us to feel bad about ourselves
- can lead us to feel negatively toward other people
- can make life and our future seem hopeless We also call these negative thoughts distortions because they are typically not accurate. To help you better understand your most common distortions, read the examples below and mark the option that best describes how frequently you experience them. Consider challenging those distorted thoughts that occur “frequently” using the thought record below. If you find yourself checking “frequently” for most of the examples, consider printing out this worksheet and bringing it to your healthcare provider so you can work together to challenge those thoughts.
Distortion Frequently Sometimes Never All-or-nothing thinking: You see things in black and white categories. If you performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.
o
Overgeneralization: You see a single negative event as never-ending pattern of defeat. o o
Mental Filter: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors an entire beaker of water.
o
Disqualifying the positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count.” You maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.
o
Jumping to conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.
o
Mind reading: You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively toward you without bothering to determine if your assumption is correct.
o
The Fortune Teller Error: You anticipate that things will turn out badly and feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.
o
Magnification (catastrophizing) or minimization: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your own goof-up or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (such as your own desirable qualities or another person’s imperfections).
o
Emotional reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.”
o
Should statements: You try to motivate yourself with “should” and “shouldn’ts,” as if you had to be punished before you could be expected to do anything. “Musts” and “oughts” are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When others direct should statements toward you, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.
o
Labeling and mislabeling: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser.” When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him, “He’s a loser.” Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.
o
Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event for which, in fact, you were not primarily responsible.
o
Adapted from Burns, David D., MD. 1989. The Feeling Good Handbook. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc.
o o o o o o o o o o o
o o o o o o o o o o o o
Thought Record
Negative Thought Type of Distortion Rational Response This psychiatric disorder has ruined my life. All or Nothing Thinking My illness is just one part of my life. There are several good things in my life, including friends, family, and school. They are all a part of my life, too. My life is not ruined.
