You might be thinking, “There’s no way I am holding on to any blatantly false beliefs!” While most people don’t suffer in their daily lives from these kinds of cognitive distortions, it seems that no one can completely escape these distortions. It can be scary to admit that you may fall prey to distorted thinking. And have the potential to cause psychological damage.Tendencies or patterns of thinking or believing.That is why they can be so damaging since it’s hard to change what you don’t recognize as something that needs to change!Ĭognitive distortions come in many forms (which we’ll cover later in this piece), but they all have some things in common. These patterns and systems of thought are often subtle–it’s difficult to recognize them when they are a regular feature of your day-to-day thoughts. They are irrational thoughts and beliefs that we unknowingly reinforce over time. Changing Your Thinking: Examples of Techniques to Combat Cognitive DistortionsĬognitive distortions are biased perspectives we take on ourselves and the world around us.A List of the Most Common Cognitive Distortions.Experts in Cognitive Distortions: Aaron Beck and David Burns.These science-based exercises will provide you with a detailed insight into Positive CBT and will give you additional tools to address cognitive distortions in your therapy or coaching. In the context of our thoughts and beliefs, these mistakes are referred to as “cognitive distortions.”īefore you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Positive CBT Exercises for free. There are many terms for this kind of mistake in social science research, complete with academic jargon and overly complicated phrasing. It is all too easy to view a coincidence or a complicated relationship and make false or overly simplistic assumptions in research-just as it is easy to connect two events or thoughts that occur around the same time when there are no real ties between them. The refrain “correlation does not equal causation!” is a familiar one to any student of psychology or the social sciences. This tendency to make connections where there is no true relationship is the basis of a common problem when it comes to interpreting research: the assumption that because two variables are correlated, one causes or leads to the other. Our brains are predisposed to making connections between thoughts, ideas, actions, and consequences, whether they are truly connected or not. It can be surprisingly easy to create faulty connections in the brain. It’s not that your brain is purposely lying to you, it’s just that it may have developed some faulty or non-helpful connections over time. However, there are some occasions when you may want to second guess what your brain is telling you. Generally, this is a good thing-our brain has been wired to alert us to danger, attract us to potential mates, and find solutions to the problems we encounter every day. After all, if you can’t trust your own brain, what can you trust? Our website does not record personal information you enter here.We tend to trust what goes on in our brains. (Print/save responses to your device at each step. To continue with our example from Step 1, we now record the thoughts that immediately came to mind in response to the triggering situation using our Activity Sheet, your notes, or the form below. Increasing awareness of our automatic negative thoughts is a crucial step in the cognitive restructuring process. and our feelings (e.g., Sadness, fear).our perceptions of others (e.g., Everyone hates me My boss thinks I’m useless),.we think about ourselves: (e.g., I’m a failure I’m not good enough),.Such automatic negative thoughts underlie how: Shit, I’m going to be in trouble tomorrow. An automatic negative thought might be something like, ‘Oh crap, he must have hated my proposal. These thoughts often reflect poorly on ourselves and happen often throughout the day, in many different contexts.įor example, Robert receives an email in the evening from his boss asking to meet with him first thing in the morning about the proposal Robert just submitted. When dealing with depression, our automatic thoughts tend to be quite negative, intense, and pervasive. These thoughts happen spontaneously and shape the internal monologue that occurs in our minds, influences our memories, and affects our perceptions of ourselves and the world around us. Be Aware of Your “Automatic Negative Thoughts”Īutomatic thoughts are our immediate interpretations of our experiences. In other words, this step involves examining our automatic thoughts about the situation what we tell ourselves about what happened (i.e., our self-talk), and the meaning we attribute to the event for ourselves and others. Now that we have a clearer picture of the situation/context that led to us feeling upset, the next step is to take a look at how we interpret the triggering situation.
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