Cognitive Distortions

Front 1

All-or-Nothing Thinking

Back 1

You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.

Front 2

Overgeneralization

Back 2

You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.

Front 3

Mental Filter

Back 3

You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that colors the entire beaker of water.

Front 4

Disqualifying the Positive

Back 4

You reject positive experiences by insisting they "don't count" for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.

Front 5

Jumping to Conclusions

Back 5

You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.

Front 6

Jumping to Conclusions: Mind Reading

Back 6

You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don't bother to check this out.

Front 7

Jumping to Conclusions: The Fortune Teller Error

Back 7

You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.

Front 8

Magnification (Catastrophizing) or Minimization

Back 8

You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else's achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellows imperfections). This is also called the "binocular trick."

Front 9

Emotional Reasoning

Back 9

You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are. "I feel it, therefore it must be true."

Front 10

Should Statements

Back 10

You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn'ts as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. "Musts" and "oughts" are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration and resentment

Front 11

Labeling and Mislabeling

Back 11

This is an extreme form of over-generalization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: "I'm a loser." When someone else's behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: "He's an idiot." Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.

Front 12

Personalization

Back 12

You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.