Cognitive Distortions
All-Or-Nothing Thinking: You see things in black and white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.
Overgeneralization: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern.
Mental Filter: You pick out a single negative detail or situation and dwell on it exclusively, so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors the entire beaker of water or darkened sunglasses that darken your perception of the world you are viewing.
Disqualifying The Positive: You reject positive information or experiences by insisting they "don't count" for some reason or another. In this way, you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by evidence from your everyday experiences.
Jumping To The Conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusions.
a) Mind Reading: You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don't bother to check this assumption out.
b) Predicting The Future: You anticipate that things will turn out badly and are sure your prediction of doom will happen.
Catastrophizing Or Minimizing: You inappropriately exaggerate the importance or possible harm in a situation or event. Or you may inappropriately shrink things until they become tiny or of no importance.
Emotional Reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: "I feel it, therefore, it must be true."
Shoulding: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and should nots, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. Musts and Oughts are also offenders in this category. When you direct shoulds outwardly, you will experience emotions of anger, frustration, and resentment with others and situations.
Labeling: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. An inaccurate and emotional label is used instead of an accurate assessment of the error or situation; for example, "I'm a total loser", "He is a lazy bum", "Drivers are all idiots".
Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event or someone's reaction for which, in fact, you were not necessarily a consideration or an important factor.