Cognitive Distortions

People with poor self image, depression, anxiety, and some other issues often have distorted thinking that doesn't reflect reality, and which can serve to sustain their problems. Although the content of these thoughts can take on many forms, psychologists have identified a few broad types ways they can be present a skewed picture of the world.

Depending on a person's issues, their thoughts will tend to distort in certain general directions:

Below are descriptions of the main cognitive distortions. They're extremely well-known and you may have seen a similar list elsewhere. Knowing them is one of the cornerstones to identifying and cutting off maladaptive thoughts. You'll notice that several of the distortions blur into each other somewhat or produce similar outcomes. When someone has a negative or anxious thought you can usually make a case for several different distortions applying to it.

After the main cognitive distortions I'll quickly mention two other ways people's thinking can go awry.

All-or-Nothing Thinking / Black and White Thinking

Seeing the world in simplistic, absolute terms. This may involve extreme comparisons like Perfect vs. Useless, or words like 'never' or 'always'. People may think things such as:

Black and White thinking also tends to trip people up when they're setting goals or monitoring their progress. They'll feel they either have to do something perfectly, on the first attempt, or they've totally failed or there's no point in trying anymore. In many situations someone can often gain a lot of benefits from becoming even 30% better at something.

Over-generalization

Taking a few isolated incidences and making sweeping generalizations about yourself, other people, or your life:

Filtering

Applying a 'dark-tinted' mental filter to your perceptions so that you see and dwell on the bad aspects of something, but ignore the good. This can involve "seeing what you want to see", e.g., noticing the few incidences where people seem to act rude or indifferent towards you, while overlooking all the times they're friendly.

Filtering can play a role in sustaining depressed or insecure feelings. In any given day someone is going to do some things well and other things poorly. They're going to have a mix of good or bad experiences. Regardless of the conclusion they want to reach, the world offers up enough variety that anyone can cherry pick some evidence that supports their view. A depressed person can take all the times they mess up, and disregard all their successes, and use that to make their case that they're flawed and hopeless.

Disqualifying the positive

When you dismiss positive events for no good reason, probably while being all too eager to believe the negative ones.

Jumping to conclusions

When you quickly assume something negative, even though it has no basis in reality. There are two variations, one involving how people think, the other related to how something will turn out:

Mind reading

When you believe someone thinks a certain, usually negative, way, even though you have no real evidence to support it:

Fortune telling

When you jump to conclusions by assuming something will turn out a certain way, though the belief has a shaky grounding.

Magnification and minimization

Overstating or understating how something really is, again with a poor reason to back up your thinking.

Catastrophizing

When your mind leaps to the worst thing that could possibly happen. Can also mean to see a situation as totally hopeless or unbearable, when it's really just uncomfortable. This cognitive distortion tends to fan the flames of anxiety.

Emotional reasoning

Thinking that because your emotions are telling you something is X, that it is truly is X.

Should statements

Constraining yourself with unrealistic expectations about how you 'should' be.

Labeling

Slapping simplistic labels on things in order to explain them, rather than looking at the unique facets of the situation.

Personalization

Thinking you directly caused something to happen, or that something relates to you, when other forces may have been at work.

That's it for the cognitive distortions. Here are two more thinking "errors" you'll often hear about when this topic comes up:


Unanswered questions

Sometimes when we're worried about something we'll pose these scary questions to ourselves, but not actually answer them. We may ask ourselves, "What if I never meet any friends all through college?!?" That's not a pleasant possibility, and it makes us more worked up.

Often if we just take a minute to actually address the question in our minds it can take away most of its steam. Someone might say, "What if I never meet any friends all through college?... Well that's highly unlikely, especially if I put effort into it. But I suppose I'd be kind of lonely and would have to do other fun things instead of being with people. I'd have to rely on my friends from high-school and my family for support. Maybe I'd volunteer at an agency where I have to be around people, so I can still get some social interaction in" Maybe not the best situation, but it just seems kind of mundane and tolerable at the same time. That's often what happens when we answer those types of scary questions. What we come up with is some real world situation that we could handle.

Explanatory Style

There's some evidence to support the idea that people who are depressed tend to give different reasons for why things happen compared to those with a more typical mood. The same thing can happen when someone is insecure. When something bad happens to a depressed person they attribute the cause to personal/internal, permanent/stable, pervasive/global causes. In other words, the problem was because of an internal flaw they had, that problem will always be there, and it affects all aspects of their life. For example, "That conversation went badly because I suck with people, I'll always suck with people, and I suck with people in every situation."

However, when something good happens their depressed world view puts a totally different twist on things. They write it off as being because of some outside event, that it won't last, and that it doesn't change the overall picture. If someone approached them in class one day and started chatting to them, they may excuse it by saying, "Well they're only talking to me because they're in an unusually good mood or something. They'll probably realize I'm boring soon enough and move on to someone else."

People who are more positive and confident tend to think the opposite way. If something good happens they chalk it up to some positive trait they have, and believe there's more where that's coming from. If something bad happens to them they write it off as an unlucky, one-off fluke. So if they have a pleasant conversation with someone they may tell themselves it's because of how genuine and interesting there are. If they have a bad interaction they'll blame it on the other person and remind themselves most of the time things go differently.