Help CenterThinking traps, also known as automatic negative thoughts or cognitive distortions, are automatic irrational or negative thought patterns that can lead us to believe things that aren’t necessarily true. Learning to notice them and challenge them with more reasonable and rational thoughts is a life skill that we can all use!
Mindreading: Assuming that others are thinking negative things about us
Overgeneralizing: Applying individual experiences holistically using terms like “always” or “never”
Should or all-or-nothing thinking: A form of rigid thinking indicating an absolute correct way of being or doing
Personalization: Taking the blame for things outside of one’s control, or the full blame when other contributors were present
Catastrophizing: Focusing on worst-case scenarios vs. most probable outcomes
Labeling: Attaching a negative label as a generalization to self or others based on a single trait or behavior
Emotional reasoning: Viewing and acting on feelings as facts
Jumping to conclusions: Making assumptions based on insufficient evidence
Discounting the positive: Ignoring, downplaying, or rejecting positive experiences
Fortune telling: Predicting negative outcomes vs. considering most probable outcomes
Filtering: Only focusing on the negative aspects of experiences and filtering out the positive
Fallacy of change: Believing that others need to change to make us happy
Always being right: Seeing one’s own beliefs as always right and other’s contradicting beliefs as always wrong
Control fallacies: Viewing oneself as having all control or no control over situations
Minimizing: Reducing the significance of events
Which of these, if any, seem to come up for you?
Check out the Challenging Automatic Negative Thoughts Exercise for what you can do about it.