Mental filter: Focusing on one negative part of a situation (or yourself) and ignoring any positive aspects.I just know I will never get what I want out of life.” Example: “I didn’t get that job I was hoping for.Look out for: never, always, all, every, none, no one, everyone, etc.Overgeneralization: When one thing goes wrong, you think that everything will always go wrong.Now that I’ve missed a day, I’ve failed, so I might as well give up.” Example: “I wanted to work out every day this week.All or Nothing Thinking: You see things in black and white categories or think that unless something is perfect, it’s a failure.Types of cognitive distortions to look out for: I once had a patient accidentally refer to them as cognitive contortions, and they were not wrong! Cognitive distortions often have the truth all twisted up. Often these junk thoughts are distorted in some way that is not helpful, and generally not true (or not entirely true). And you can give the unhelpful thoughts in your brain just as much value and importance as you give the junk email in your inbox: none. But the majority of the email you get is just junk. Some emails have fun content that you enjoy. Some emails are useful and give us important information or help us accomplish something. It can be useful to think of thoughts like email. And just by sheer probability, some of those thoughts are going to be helpful and some of them may be not so helpful. Which means that over the course of a day, you are going to have a lot of thoughts. Kinds of Unhelpful Thoughts to Look Out For If you want to change how you are feeling, then it can be powerful to respond to unhelpful thoughts differently.īut first, it can be helpful to know what you’re looking for. Knowing about the relationship between our thoughts, feelings, and actions can be a powerful thing, because our emotions don’t exactly come with a remote control. You can think of NATs like gnats: you don’t ask for them, they buzz around your head, and they don’t generally put you in a good mood. In this case, these unhelpful thoughts might be called Negative Automatic Thoughts, or NATs for short. You don’t decide to think that Bob is a jerk or worry if you offended him, these thoughts just show up. Most of the time, the first thoughts that you have will simply pop into your head.

For example, if you decide to ignore Bob from now on, he’s probably not going to become your new work buddy. How you respond can also change the situation itself. You can see how your interpretation of the situation can drastically change your feelings about it, as well as how you decide to act moving forward. Your ideas about yourself, the world, and how other people tend to behave can color your perceptions of specific situations, such as why Bob didn’t respond. This loop is called the Cognitive Triangle: Your thoughts affect your feelings, your feelings affect your actions, your actions affect the situations you’re in, and then you have more thoughts about those situations. The next time you saw Bob, you might say “Hey,” again. If you assumed that he just didn’t year you, you probably wouldn’t have any sort of strong feelings about the situation and just go about your day. If you thought he might be having a hard time, however, you might feel sympathetic towards Bob and make a point to smile at him later and ask him, “How’s it going?” And you’re definitely not going to go out of your way to talk to him in the future, but only because he’s not worth your time. You might try to avoid running into him, or maybe try to figure out what you said before to upset him.īut if you jumped to the conclusion that he ignored you because he’s a jerk, you’re probably feeling kind of annoyed. If your brain jumped to the first thought, then you might feel anxious or embarrassed. Maybe he’s having a bad day and he’s stuck in his own head.That guy is such a jerk for ignoring me.I wonder if I said something earlier that upset him. You might think all kinds of thoughts about why Bob didn’t respond. No smile, no wave, no “Hey” back, nothing. You and Bob aren’t close, but you remember him from that meeting last week, so you decide to say, “Hey!”īut Bob doesn’t respond. Let’s say you’re walking down the hallway at work, and you walk past Bob. But let’s look at the impact that unhelpful thoughts can have with an example. Whatever situation you are dealing with, you are obviously going to have thoughts about it. Why Do Thoughts Matter in the First Place?

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