Cognitive Distortions
1. All-or-Nothing Thinking: You see things in black-and-white categories. All-or-nothing statements include: “I am a totally worthless parent/spouse/ employee/ friend”, “I’m a loser.” If you lose one customer, you feel like your business is failing. If you have a bad date, it means you will be alone forever.2. Disqualifying the Positive: You reject a compliment, or a positive aspect of your life, by insisting that it doesn’t count. For example: “I just got lucky”, “If they knew the real me, they wouldn’t like me”, or “Yeah, I’m improving, but I still more anxious than so-and-so.”
3. Jumping to Conclusions: You make assumptions based on limited information: “I’ve been shy for too long, so I can never get better”, “They didn’t text me back yet, so they must hate me,” or “She didn’t laugh at my joke, she must feel I’m lame now”
4. Mind Reading: You assume that you know what other people are thinking: “He didn’t say hello to me today, so he must think I’m nerdy”, “They looked uncomfortable, so they must not have liked me”, or “I was really quite, so she must have had a horrible time”
5. Fortunetelling: You anticipate that things will turn out badly: “No one will ever love me” or “I’m going to fail” or “I will never feel better.”
6. Catastrophizing: You exaggerate the importance of a negative event or a personal flaw: “If I lose this job/ marriage /relationship, my life will be over - I can’t possibly be happy again”, “If I’m in pain/sick/anxious/sad, then I can’t accomplish anything”, or “If this date goes badly, my life is over.”
7. Emotional Reasoning: You give too much credence to your feelings and intuitions, rather than acknowledging that they are fallible: “I feel deep down inside like I will never get better, so it must be true,” “I get a bad feeling about this presentation, it’s going to be horrible”
8. Should Statements: You tell yourself you should or must do something and hold yourself to inflexible and impossibly high standards: “I must always be charming” or “I should never do something embarrassing,” or “I should be the perfect parent/spouse/employee/friend.”
9. Personalization: You blame yourself entirely for something. This most typically happens when a relationship ends, a group endeavor fails, a particular conversation gets boring, or you have a bad date: “It’s all my fault.”