Sometimes our thinking and feeling are taking us down into a hot mess mindset. It blinds us to a rational view of a situation.
Throughout my life, I have been in and out of cognitive behavior therapy, which has helped me see events in life my from a undistorted viewpoint.
This is a two-part post as the Cognitive Behavior Distortion list is long, and I don’t want to lose your engagement.
The cognitive distorted views are as follows:
Filtering, this is when we take negative details and magnify them while we discount the positive aspects of a situation. For example, someone compliments you on your makeup, and you respond by saying “I have a huge zit I had to cover up.”
Polarized Thinking, you see the world through black and white lenses. You find no middle ground or a gray area to an event, or point of view. For example, if you got a B on a test instead of an A you feel like a loser.
Overgeneralization, you come to a general conclusion based on a single event or evidence of an unhappy situation that occurred to you in the past. You think every man is a cheater because you got cheated on once.
Jumping to Conclusions, without anyone saying something to you directly, you conclude how someone else feels about you. You don’t bother to gather all the facts. Another example is that you tell yourself you will not get the promotion. It’s a whole defeatist attitude.
Catastrophizing, we are expecting a disaster to strike no matter what. Psychologists also referred to it as magnifying an ant into an elephant. A person exaggerates the importance of an insignificant event.
Personalization, it’s where a person believes that everything others do or say to be a direct hit or attack on themselves. Also, the person compares themselves to others by trying to determine who is smarter, better looking, richer, etc.
Control Fallacies, this person sees the external control of the world and feels helpless. For example, a person will blame their boss for making them work overtime as the excuse for bad performance, or task.
On next week’s posts, I will release the next eight common cognitive distortions.
Sending healthy mental vibes 💋
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