Title: Ten Cognitive Distortions • Common Thinking Errors in CBT
Headings: Cognitive Distortions (Thinking Errors)
Cognitive Distortions (Thinking Errors)
What are Cognitive Distortions?
Why are Cognitive Distortions so important to understand?
Ten common Cognitive Distortions
It can help when trying to recognise your own cognitive distortions if you are aware of what some of the most common ones can look like. Here are ten of the most common thought distortions you might have experienced:
1. 'All or Nothing' Thinking
Example: If you get eighty per cent on a test, you feel like a failure that you didn't get a perfect score.
2. Jumping to Conclusions
3. Overgeneralisation
4. Magnifying or Minimising (also referred to as “Catastrophisation”)
5. Mental Filter
6. Disqualifying the Positive
7. Personalisation
8. Shoulds and Oughts
9. Emotional Reasoning
10. Labelling
Do you suffer from Cognitive Distortions?
References

Content: These rigid views or rules can generate feels of anger, frustration, resentment, disappointment and guilt if not followed. Example: You don't like playing tennis but take lessons as you feel you 'should', and that you 'shouldn't' make so many mistakes on the court, and that your coach 'ought to' be stricter on you. You also feel that you 'must' please him by trying harder. 9. Emotional Reasoning
Emotional reasoning is when we assume feelings reflect fact, regardless of the evidence. The idea here is “I feel it, therefore it must be true”. Such thinking can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies whereby our thoughts can end up eliciting the very behaviour we predicted, just because we changed our behaviour in accordance with that thought. For example, if you think “I feel ugly and stupid, so then I must actually be ugly and stupid” you might then stop buying yourself new clothes and start doing poorly at the course you are taking at university, even though you look fine and were doing very well at school. 10.