Cognitive Distortions

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor and none of this should be misconstrued as medical advice. I am merely an inquisitive cartoon on the internet with a strong interest in mental health. You should consult with a medical professional before making any changes to your life and should not disregard their advice because of things read here.

Cognitive Distortions are inaccurate thought patterns that you might’ve learned to view the world from your past experiences. These are things that can’t logically be true but when unaware, we think that they are. In this article, we’re going to cover the impacts of these and ten of the most common ones.

Cognitive— “of, relating to, being, or involving conscious intellectual activity (such as thinking, reasoning, or remembering)”.

Distortion— “the act of twisting or altering something out of its true, natural, or original state”

Cognitive distortions are when you use a certain way of thinking to come to a false conclusion. Your perception of truth gets in the way of actual truth. When this happens, you’re likely to miss opportunities, have worse relationships, less ease of mind, etc. However, by identifying cognitive distortions, we can enrich our experience of life by letting them go.

“I feel a certain way, therefore it must be true.”

This is where you use your emotions to determine what is true or not. An example of this is, “I feel anxious, therefore this is something worth being anxious about.” You’re making a conclusion on how you feel— not what you can logically conclude. When using this, you’re pushed around life by your feelings regardless of how accurately they steer you.

All-or-nothing thinking is when something has to be a certain way. When you’re thinking in all-or-nothing thinking, there are two options: perfection or failure. While striving for perfection may seem like a valuable mindset to have, it can wear down on your mental state when you apply this thinking to every aspect of your life. On top of this, striving for absolute perfection means you’re never going to reach it.

If you often take stabs in your head at what other people are thinking, or even think you know what they are thinking, this one’s for you.

Mind reading is when you falsely believe you can tell what somebody else is thinking without adequate evidence (like body language and talking to them). You can’t. This leads to assumptions, rabbit holes, problems in relationships, etc. While you might be able to have an idea of what someone is thinking, falsely believing that you know for certain without asking them creates undesirable outcomes.

Fortune telling is when you’re convinced an event (likely negative) is going to happen in the future without proper evidence and reasoning to back it up. Think of people involved in cults convinced the world is going to end.

Overgeneralization is when you take one small, specific thing and then use it to come to a much broader conclusion. For example, say you forget to do something for a friend a weekend where you were extremely busy. You could overgeneralize this to “I’m a bad friend” when you’ve never done something similar to this in the past.

“The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.” — Albert Einstein

This cognitive distortion is when something thinks that they are always right and already know everything. And usually, these people know the least. My theory at why people engage in this is from some sort of pride in their intellect and/or a feeling of inferiority. To think that you already know everything signals you’ve never gone deep on a topic before. In addition to this, in disagreements (especially with friends) often the experience is more important than whether or not who’s right. You could prove yourself right, but also prove yourself an asshole.

Have you ever gotten feedback from someone and all you could focus on is the bad stuff? This is where we assign much more value to things that are negative than the positive. This creates a skewed perspective where all we see is the negative. On the flip side, you’re unlikely to give yourself credit where credit is due. When dealing with this distortion, people only assign themselves blame without praise.

This is when you label someone or something a certain way just because of one or two experiences. For example, if someone does something you would consider selfish one time, it wouldn’t make sense to label them a selfish person. This can lead to a skewed perspective of that person. You can also apply this to yourself as well, labeling yourself something like “a lazy person” after not hitting your goals for one day. Pushing yourself towards your goals is one of the best feelings on Earth, but the way you do it will influences your relationship with yourself.

This is where people chain events together (in an unrealistic fashion) to arrive at the most unlikely, undesired outcome. For example, you could think that because you messed up your diet for the day, your week is ruined. Because your week is ruined, you won’t hit your goals for the month… etc. Catastrophizing is taking one small thing and blowing it out of proportion.

This is one of my favorite cognitive distortions that I think about often. It’s where you assume an incorrect amount of control of a situation. For example, you could blame your obesity and depression on genetics and your job and the place that you live in. We know that people can control their weight and mental states. Believing that you can’t is a control fallacy that will get you nowhere. On the flip side, you can assume you have too much control over your life. This tweet from @pontivflex (great follow) sums this idea up best.

🦇 Pontivflex 🦇@pontivflex

Big lesson of my 20s I’m on God’s time, not my time I’m exactly where I need to be, when I need to be there Just keep pushing and taking shots. He’ll get me where I need to go

1:06 AM · Jul 31, 2022

61 Reposts · 491 Likes

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