Cognitive Distortions
The Lies We Tell Ourselves (and How to Stop Believing Them)
Cognitive distortions are unrealistic or irrational thoughts. Typically, they are exaggerated and negative perceptions of our lives or the world. - Berkeley Well-being
Let me give you a scenario: It’s the new year. You have goals you’re trying to accomplish, and habits you’re trying to build. One of those goals is to cut out added sugar. You do great for a few days, maybe even weeks, but eventually you slip up and eat a delicious cookie (you’re human after all).
Shit. You just broke your habit. Your vision for the new year is kaput. That one cookie was the Jenga block that fell the tower. You are a piece of garbage who can’t stick to anything.
Ah well. Might as well eat another cookie. Or several. Or the whole box. It doesn’t matter anymore anyway.
That was an example of a cognitive distortion called All-or-Nothing Thinking (and a couple of others). Your mind decided that you can never have cookies, or you can always have cookies. Even just one cookie breaks the never, so the default is always.
Reading this scenario and not living through it, you may think it’s easy to see where we went wrong. It is okay to have a cookie or two sometimes. There’s a balance to find between everything all the time and nothing at all. If the hypothetical you in this scenario just ate the one cookie and didn’t devolve from there, everything would be okay.
Reminder: It’s easier for us to poke holes in other people’s irrational thoughts than our own. I’m sure you can think of a time when you struggled with All-or-Nothing Thinking. Maybe it was when you made a mistake on the coffee you were making at work, or the spreadsheet you were preparing, or any other of the myriad of mistakes humans make. Can you remember telling yourself: Wow, I never get things right. I’m always making mistakes like this.
That can feel pretty terrible. The good news is there are tried and true methods to get around All-or-Nothing Thinking, as well as other cognitive distortions. Let’s go through all of them first, then discuss solutions after that.
Exploring the Nine(ish) Cognitive Distortions
Magnification/Minimization
Magnification is when you place way more importance on something than you need to, or even should. Minimization is the opposite.
For example, imagine you just got promoted at work. Minimization would downplay all the hard work you did to even be eligible for promotion. It might tell you that you didn’t work that hard at all, they just needed to fill a spot and you were an available warm body. Untrue, yet you believe it. This is hurtful to you because it minimizes the real work you put in to get to that spot. You deserve credit here but your brain won’t let you take it.
Or, on the flip side, imagine you lost a promotion at work to a coworker. Magnification might place a lot of importance on a mistake you made a couple of weeks ago, asserting that it’s the reason you didn’t get the promotion. The reality is probably that yes, it could be a factor, but everyone makes mistakes and you are otherwise a good employee. Maybe your coworker has been there longer than you, so seniority was the tiebreaker. It could be any number of reasons but you are blaming yourself for one mistake. Also not great.
If you’ve ever heard of catastrophizing, that also fits within the umbrella of Magnification/Minimization. You are magnifying the worst things that could happen in a given scenario, ignoring all the neutral or even positive potential outcomes.
Overgeneralization
Overgeneralization largely overlaps with both Magnification/Minimization and All-or-Nothing Thinking. It’s essentially taking something that happens in one instance and applying it to a lot of other areas in your life (even ones that it has no business being applied to).
Seeing a cow drop a mud pie can be generalized to assume all cows drop big gross mud pies. This makes sense.
Generalizing an awkward conversation you had to not allow yourself to make phone calls or use a traditional checkout lane at the grocery store because you’re too awkward to do so? That’s a stretch. Anecdotal evidence is not necessarily real evidence.
Speaking of things that aren’t necessarily real…
Magical Thinking
This one trends hippy-dippy. It’s the belief that your thoughts or emotions have real impacts on others beyond your interactions with them. Did you forget to wish your friend good luck on their job interview and then they didn’t get it? To think you jinxed it by not wishing them luck, thus making yourself guilty in their loss of opportunity, is Magical Thinking. Many factors go into job interviews and hiring processes. Well-wishing friends of the interviewee are not factors. You did not cause that to happen.
Personalization
Personalization takes things out of your control and makes them your fault. The cashier you see at the grocery store (because you got over the overgeneralization of that one awkward conversation) who’s always grumpy? You may think they’re grumpy because you’re there and sometimes you’re awkward. In reality, they are grumpy for lots of other reasons. You being a little awkward when you see them doesn’t change that. It’s not your fault.
Jumping to Conclusions
This distortion is essentially self-explanatory. It’s about you assuming things without the necessary evidence. It’s broken into two sections.
Mind Reading
Mind Reading is a form of Jumping to Conclusions where you assume what people think of you without them telling you or any other sort of indication. I don’t want to go to dinner with my partner’s friend Kyle. He hates me. This thought comes after briefly meeting him one time, and it was a pleasant exchange. Why do you believe he hates you or doesn’t want to see you?
Mind Reading is one of the hardest ones for me. In social scenarios, I always assume people don’t want to talk to me because they think I’m boring. Has anyone ever told me that? Maybe in middle school when we were all little demons. I can’t remember. The point is I have no evidence to go with my assumption. (Shit. I said always. That’s All-or-Nothing Thinking. Dammit.)
Fortune Telling
The other side of Jumping to Conclusions concerns events rather than people. You know, 100%, for sure, that you’re gonna biff it on the sidewalk when you try to start running as a hobby. The evidence? You haven’t run in a while, I guess? But you still walk around and use your body every day and don’t constantly trip over things.
Hmm… No evidence then? You get the picture.
Emotional Reasoning
“I feel _____, therefore I am _____.” Just a little twist on an age-old philosophical argument for you. Does it make sense or provide helpful context? No? Okay.
Emotional Reasoning concerns using feelings (often negative ones) to assert facts about yourself or other things. Just because you feel like a lazy POS after having a hard time completing tasks on your to-do list one day, doesn’t mean you are one. It was just a tough day. Do you believe me, though? That’s why we’re here talking about these.
Just a couple more distortions to go through before we discuss how to combat them.
Disqualifying the Positive
Similar to the Minimization of Magnification/Minimization, Disqualifying the Positive makes you think that good things don’t hold any weight.
Think back to the cookie example from the beginning of the article. Even if you do give up on your sugar-free crusading and you do eat the whole box of cookies, you still managed to go a couple of weeks without added sugars. That’s commendable. Will your brain let you accept that big positive? Probably not. It’s distorting the truth of the situation.
“Should” Statements
Have you heard the classic phrase therapists love telling you?
“Don’t should on yourself.”
Should Statements are beliefs about the way things ought to be, not the way things are. You should be able to control yourself and not eat a cookie. You should exercise more often. The people on TV should be a little less incendiary in how they communicate.
Would it be nice if all those things were true? Maybe. But the act of saying “should” tells you that things are not right. It shames you for not being right, or perfect. How are things supposed to get better if you’re too busy beating yourself up for not already being there? Food for thought.
All-or-Nothing Thinking
And so we’ve come full circle. I think we’ve covered this one enough so I’ll just give the briefest definition, brought to you by therapistaid:
Thinking in absolutes such as “always,” “never,” or “every.” “I never do a good enough job on anything.”
Stop Believing the Lies
Do you have a good grip on what all the cognitive distortions are? Or are they all merging in your head and becoming a nebulous monster? Yeah, there are a lot of similarities between them. It will take time to sort them out enough to stick. Practice and time.
There is an exercise you can do to help yourself stop believing these distortions when they arise. Practice it enough and, in theory, it will eventually become almost automatic. I’ve gotten good at dealing with some but not others. Guess I need to practice more too.
Your mission is to
Write down a thought you have that’s causing you some mental discomfort.
Examine the evidence for your claim as objectively as you can. Do you notice any exaggeration, minimization, or something else?
Go through the list of cognitive distortions, evaluating whether you see any creeping up through that thought. It could be one, it could be a few.
Write down a new thought based on the evidence, trying to get rid of any cognitive distortions that were present.
Reflect on how you feel about the new thought. Do you believe it?
One really hard thing about this: We are often in depressed states when we need this exercise the most. It’s five bullet points, and only takes five minutes or so, but I often do not have the capacity for that.
If you can’t try this exercise today, that’s okay. Thank you for reading this far in the article anyway. That on its own is a great step in taking care of yourself. I’d encourage you to come back and try it at a different time; it might help more than you think.
If you can do this exercise today, consider sharing your work, or how you felt about the exercise, in the comments. We’d love to hear from you. But please only do so if you are comfortable. I know it’s vulnerable and can be scary.
Thank you for being here. I love you.
-Ethan
This page is not intended to be medical advice. Consult with a psychiatrist or other provider before pursuing any treatment options discussed here.
If you are in crisis, call or text the National Suicide Hotline: 988
Ethan, All these things have been part of my thought patterns. Well said. Bless you for channeling your thoughts to help others.