Cognitive Distortions

My Phase 2 Lion Rock homework is actually one big assignment. I'll post my progress on the assignment, a key idea is Cognitive Distortions. This is the description from Lion Rock: Our head can be a dangerous place, we often have patterns of self defeating thought that lead us to bad feelings and subsequently bad decisions. Remember, thoughts lead to feeling, feelings lead to urges and urges lead to actions. If we can learn to identify when a thought is distorted, we can correct it or redirect it in such a way that the bad feelings and actions are minimized. If we can teach ourselves to recognize a thought as a cognitive distortion we are more likely to be able to change our thoughts, moods, and behaviors. Here is a list of the 10 most common Cognitive Distortions. Take a look and see if any of them are getting in your way. Try and give personal examples of when you have experienced each one. All-or-nothing thinking: You see things in black and white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure. Overgeneralization: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat. Mental filter: You pick our a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors an entire beaker of water. Disqualifying the positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting they "don't count" for some reason. You maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences. Jumping to conclusions: You make a negative interpretations even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion. Mind reading: You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you and don't bother to check it out. The Fortune Teller error: You anticipate that things will turn out badly and feel convinced that your prediction is an established fact. Magnification (catastrophizing) or minimization: You exaggerate the importance of things or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny. Emotional reasoning: You assume your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are. "I felt it, therefore it must be true" Should statements: You try to motivate yourself with should and shouldn'ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment. Labeling and mislabeling: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. 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 attached a negative label to him. Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored or emotionally loaded. Personlization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event for which, in fact, you were not primarily responsible.