Cognitive Distortions Make It Hard to Think Anxiety Away

Is it possible to think anxiety away? I know that navigating the maze of mental health isn't easy. Sometimes I feel like it just doesn't matter how well I've marked the path, I still can't find my way round the blasted thing. Thankfully, the mind tends to (subconsciously) organize around patterns. Even when we're struggling. Seeing the negative patterns, or cognitive distortions, will help you change them and then you can think anxiety away.

Think Anxiety Away by Reframing Cognitive Distortions

This isn't a fast-acting magic trick. But, within reason, you can think anxiety away. You can call it reframing mental patterns, thinking differently or however you want to think about it. But recognizing cognitive distortions helps to recognize and manage anxiety, and mental illness. We all use cognitive distortion to some extent.

But when fearful, stressed or experiencing a traumatic event, our minds and bodies naturally shift more toward extremes. Like a life raft, I'll find myself clinging to cognitive distortions. And it's a problem if I do too much of that, too often. My brain gets used to the distortions, stops recognizing them as distorted, and starts using them to cope with everyday life. Then they can get in the way of goals like anxiety relief, depression self-help or healing PTSD.

Top 10 Cognitive Distortions That Won't Let You Think Anxiety Away

Are any of these cognitive distortions* holding you back?

1. 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.
2. Over-generalization: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
3. Mental filter: 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 discolors the entire beaker of water.
4. Disqualifying the positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting they "don't count" for some reason or other. You maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.
5. Jumping to conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion. This one is similar to Mind reading (you arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you and don't bother to check it out) and The fortune teller error (you anticipate that things will turn out badly and feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact).
6. Magnification (catastrophizing) or minimization: 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 fellow's imperfections). This is also called the "binocular trick."
7. Emotional reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: "I feel it, therefore it must be true."
8. Should statements: 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.
9. Labeling and mislabeling: 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 a damn louse." Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.
10. Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event for which, in fact, you were not primarily responsible.

Questions For Thought

• Are there recent situations that you've used these cognitive distortions?
• Is there anything you'd rather have done differently?
• If so, why? Or why not?

Once you get why you're using cognitive distortions over a healthier thought pattern, you can start to think anxiety away. (I'll talk a little more about how later.)

See Also

• What's Destroying Your Mental Health Recovery?
• Black and White Thinking: Cognitive Distortions and Mental Illness
• Cognitive Distortions and Self-Stigma
• Anxiety Can Feel Like A Catastrophe
• Social Anxiety, Jumping to Conclusions, and Peace of Mind

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*From: Burns, David D., MD. 1989. The Feeling Good Handbook. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc.