Title: Challenging Cognitive Biases: Understanding and Overcoming Distortions
Cognitive distortions are skewed ways of thinking that can foster negative thought patterns, often stemming from depression and anxiety. These distorted thoughts can impact a person's self-perception, daily life, relationships, and perception of others. When these negative thought patterns become consistent, they can interfere with a person's overall well-being.
It's common to experience everyday negative thoughts, but when these thinking patterns become persistent and persistent, they can start to impact your day-to-day life. Cognitive distortions are these persistent negative thought patterns that can distort a person's perception of themselves, their life, their daily situations, their relationships, and others. These distorted thought patterns can contribute to mental health issues like depression and anxiety.
According to the American Psychological Association, cognitive distortions are inaccurate ways of thinking. The brain creates these mental filters as shortcuts to reduce the burden of processing large amounts of information at once. However, these mental shortcuts can lead to oversimplifications of complex thoughts, which can make a person feel badly about themselves. Research has shown that cognitive distortions can contribute to the development and worsening of mental health conditions such as depression.
Learning to identify cognitive distortions is key to improving a person's thinking patterns and mood. By understanding the structure of cognitive distortions, a person can better identify them in their thought patterns. In the 1960s and 1970s, Aaron Beck and others conducted research that led to the creation of the common therapy method cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and determined that at least 15 types of cognitive distortions exist. Understanding these types is essential to the success of CBT.
The types of cognitive distortions include:
- Labeling: a reaction in which someone classifies themselves in an entirely negative way, sometimes but not always in the aftermath of an unsuccessful life event. For example, they reduce themselves to a "failure" after getting a rejection from a job application.
- Discounting the positive: a person will discount and reduce any positive event in their life, chalking it up to luck or labeling it unimportant.
- Mental filtering: a thought pattern that lingers and focuses on negative events or thoughts, even in the face of contradictory information.
- Emotional reasoning: a person with emotional reasoning will allow their emotions to dictate what they believe as truth, without paying attention to the facts in front of them.
- Mindreading: a cognitive distortion that leads people to assume that other people have negative thoughts about them, even though they may not.
- Catastrophizing: a person who catastrophizes will dread the future, predicting negative outcomes despite having no evidence to suggest that those outcomes are possible or likely.
- Overgeneralizing: this distortion involves assuming that one negative event means all future events will have negative outcomes.
- Personalization: a person with this distortion believes that all negative events are their fault in some way.
- “Should” statements: a person may always think that they could have or must have done things in a particular way in the past, even though they did not have all the information to know how to act.
- All-or-nothing thinking: this involves viewing everything as black and white or either-or, without considering the details of a situation.
Cognitive distortions can be the result of a person's internal biases, past traumatic life events, or challenges during childhood. This negative way of thinking can continue into later life and can affect events that are not necessarily negative, causing the person to view those neutral events negatively. To treat and manage cognitive distortions, a person has to learn to restructure their thought patterns and responses to stimuli. CBT is a type of therapy that doctors recommend for many mental health conditions. CBT is a type of talk therapy that works to highlight the inaccuracy of cognitive distortions for the situations in which they occur and how they affect mood and behavior. If a person is unable or unwilling to see a therapist, they can work on identifying thoughts that contribute to negative feelings in the moment, analyzing where these thoughts come from and whether there is any evidence behind them, and replacing them with neutral thoughts.
Implementing cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can be beneficial in addressing cognitive distortions. By recognizing the prevalence of distorted thoughts in their behavioral responses, individuals can begin to challenge and replace these distortions with more accurate and balanced perspectives. For instance, someone with a tendency to catastrophize may learn to acknowledge the potential for positive outcomes, or someone who often engages in all-or-nothing thinking might discover the complexity and shades of gray within various situations.
