Cognitive thinking is how humans process information in daily life. It encompasses most mental functions, such as reasoning, remembering, understanding, learning, and thinking. Cognitive thinking deals with all of the experiences and situations that people go through and their responses to such daily life circumstances. This being said, it can be very destructive to mental health when one struggles with cognitive thinking distortions, or negative, inaccurate thoughts that convince the thinker of something that isn’t necessarily true, or twisted forms of the truth. Thinking like this can lead to anxiety, and ignoring the issue can cause greater mental health issues. Cognitive-Behavior Therapy, also referred to as CBT, is a form of therapy that
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One common distortion is black and white, or all-or-nothing thinking, where someone sees everything in terms of one extreme or another. This type of thinking “fails to acknowledge that there are almost always several shades of gray that exist between black and white. By seeing only two possible sides or outcomes to something, a person ignores the middle—and possibly more reasonable—ground” (20 Cognitive Distortions and How They Affect Your Life, 2015). A few other common cognitive thinking distortions are personalization (taking everything personally), catastrophizing (focusing on the worst possible outcome of a situation), magnifying (blowing things out of proportion or exaggerating), minimizing (minimizing positive or big events), overgeneralization (drawing conclusions based on one or two single events), and labeling (putting labels on things, people, or yourself based on one experience). Although these are only a sample of the wide variety of distortions, many people can likely claim that they fall into one of these at one time or another. It is easy to catch these damaging thought patterns once one is aware of them. Unfortunately, they can have a toll on mental health if they continue to flood the mind without any attention. They can restrain the person from accomplishing great things, due to self-doubt and the fear of failure or embarrassment. They deceive people into believing fallacies about their circumstance. One of the biggest consequences of any cognitive thinking distortion is anxiety since they reinforce negative thoughts about self, others, and circumstances and interfere with the way one perceives an event, as “cognitive psychologists see anxiety disorders as the result of illogical, irrational thought processes” (Ciccarelli & White, 2010, p.
One common distortion is black and white, or all-or-nothing thinking, where someone sees everything in terms of one extreme or another. This type of thinking “fails to acknowledge that there are almost always several shades of gray that exist between black and white. By seeing only two possible sides or outcomes to something, a person ignores the middle—and possibly more reasonable—ground” (20 Cognitive Distortions and How They Affect Your Life, 2015). A few other common cognitive thinking distortions are personalization (taking everything personally), catastrophizing (focusing on the worst possible outcome of a situation), magnifying (blowing things out of proportion or exaggerating), minimizing (minimizing positive or big events), overgeneralization (drawing conclusions based on one or two single events), and labeling (putting labels on things, people, or yourself based on one experience). Although these are only a sample of the wide variety of distortions, many people can likely claim that they fall into one of these at one time or another. It is easy to catch these damaging thought patterns once one is aware of them. Unfortunately, they can have a toll on mental health if they continue to flood the mind without any attention. They can restrain the person from accomplishing great things, due to self-doubt and the fear of failure or embarrassment. They deceive people into believing fallacies about their circumstance. One of the biggest consequences of any cognitive thinking distortion is anxiety since they reinforce negative thoughts about self, others, and circumstances and interfere with the way one perceives an event, as “cognitive psychologists see anxiety disorders as the result of illogical, irrational thought processes” (Ciccarelli & White, 2010, p.