A Useful Primer on Cognitive Distortions and Maladaptive Thinking Patterns
You may have heard of the psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, who won a Noble Prize for his work regarding human judgement and decision making. In short, his research has shown that humans have a lot of cognitive biases. These play a role in how we make decisions and think. We all have these cognitive biases and in many ways they “warp” how we make decisions. In many cases, these work outside of our own awareness or a bit on autopilot as we go through our day.
Also, it is very likely you have heard about cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). There is a significant amount of research that has been conducted over the past several decades demonstrating the effectiveness in treating many different types of emotional disorders and challenges. The Beck Institute has a good summary of much of this research on their website here. One key tenant of CBT is that when we change the way we think, we change our emotions. Therefore, identifying and modifying cognitive distortions is a key part of CBT.
Now it’s important to differentiate between cognitive biases and cognitive distortions. While both look at how our thinking can lead to inaccurate decisions or perceptions, cognitive biases are more focused on human thinking in general across multiple domains. Conversely, cognitive distortions are defined as dysfunctional patterns of thinking that are false and have the potential to cause us emotional harm. As we confront and replace our cognitive distortions with more rational and realistic cognitions, a lot of our negative emotions decrease in intensity.
We ALL are going to fall into some of these distorted ways of thinking from time to time. What is important to our overall emotional well-being is preventing these from becoming a habitual way of thinking for long periods of time. Cognitive distortions that are allowed to fester can begin to negatively impact your own deeply held beliefs about yourself.
Let us take a look at some of the common distortions that come up in counseling. In future blog posts, I will go into a bit more detail about each of these and some possible ways of intervening.
List of Common Cognitive Distortions
3. Mental Filter
4. Always Being Right
5. Jumping to conclusions – Fortune telling
6. Jumping to conclusions – Mind reading
7. Should Statements
8. Control Fallacies
9. Emotional Reasoning
10. Labeling or Mislabeling
11. Personalization
12. Magnification (Catastrophizing) or Minimizing
13. Fallacy of Fairness
14. Fallacy of Change
15. Disqualifying the Positive
16. Heaven’s Reward Fallacy
If you want more personalized support for how to work through negative thinking or other challenges, book your free consult with us. We are here to help.