10 Types Of Negative Thoughts
How to spot and stop them
It is important to know the causes behind depressive and negative thoughts in order to spot and try to stop them. Depression has a way to make you hate yourself enough to make you, your worst enemy.
You feel the way you do right now because of the thoughts you are thinking at this moment.
In the book, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, psychiatrist David Burns lists 10 cognitive distortions that form the basis for all depressions. Next time you feel upset, try to see if your emotion fits one of the cognitive distortions listed below.
1. All-or-nothing thinking
All-or-nothing thinking sees things in black-or-white categories. All-or-nothing thinkers think that they are a failure if one thing goes wrong.
An example of All-or-nothing thinking can be if a straight-A student thinks that they are a complete failure because they received their first B on a test. It causes the person to fear any mistake or imperfection because they will see themselves as a complete failure.
All-or-nothing thinking is unrealistic because life is never completely one way or another. The world is not black or white. People change, situations change, and it’s not realistic to dwell and feel down for one mistake.
Back to the example of the straight-A student receiving their first B grade, does it mean that this student is a complete failure because of one test grade? I am very confident to say that they are not. In fact, this might show them what they are not understanding and motivate them to work harder next time.
2. Overgeneralization thinking
Overgeneralization thinkers arbitrarily conclude that one thing that happened to them once will occur over and over again. Since they are generally dwelling on the negative event, they feel upset.
An example of overgeneralization is if someone asks someone out on a date and the person rejects them for one reason or another. Overgeneralization thinking will make the person believe that just because one person rejected them, everyone will reject them every time. This assumes that the entire population has an identical taste and everyone collectively decided they are not attracted to this one person.
Doesn’t that sound ridiculous?
Beauty is on the beholder! One person's rejection does not mean that every single person on earth will reject them!
3. Mental Filter
Mental filtering thinking picks out a negative detail in any situation, dwell on it exclusive, which in return makes the entire situation seem terrible.
One example of mental filtering is if someone overhears a group gossiping behind someone else’s back. Mental filtering will interpret this situation and believe that this one incident proves that the entire population is full of nasty people that stab each other in the back. In reality, this one situation doesn’t necessarily mean that the person who was gossiping was a bad person, they could just be having a bad day. Additionally, this one person’s action doesn’t mean that every single person stabs each other in the back.
Mental filtering makes the person filter out the positive and only focus on the negative.
4. Disqualifying the positive
You reject compliments and positive experiences. You believe that positive events or compliments don’t count.
One of the most common examples of this type of thinking is if someone compliments you and you reject their compliment. This kind of negative thinking makes the person believe that the compliment is a lie and prevents them from appreciating the genuine compliment.
Disqualifying the positive is one of the most destructive forms of cognitive distortion. You’re like a scientist intent on finding evidence to support some pet hypothesis. The hypothesis that dominates your depressive thinking is usually some version of “I’m second rate”. Whenever you have a negative experience, you dwell on it and conclude, “That proves what I’ve known all along”. In contrast, when you have a positive experience, you tell yourself, “That was a fluke. It doesn’t count.” The price you pay for this tendency is intense misery and an inability to appreciate the good things that happen.
5. Jumping to conclusions thinking
There are two types of jumping to conclusions; “mind-reading” and “fortune teller error”. In both cases, the person often jumps to conclusions without any justifications of the facts of the situation.
Mind Reading
Imagine you passed your friend in the streets and they didn’t say hi to you because they are absorbed with their thoughts. A mind-reading way of jumping to conclusions is to automatically assume that your friend must hate you and doesn’t want to be friends with you anymore. In reality, the friend was caught up in their thoughts.
Mind reading is harmful because by assuming that the other person thinks negatively of you (when they do not) you waste your energy and morale.
Fortune teller error
The fortune-teller error tries to make negative predictions about the future. One example is a therapy patient believing that nothing will cure them and that they will be depressed forever. The patient acts like they can see their future in a crystal ball and assumes the very worst. In reality, if the patient tries to stop this type of thinking, they might be able to get out their negative thoughts.
6. Magnification and minimization
Magnification and minimization thinking exaggerates things out of proportion. An example of magnification thinking is if you make one mistake at work, you think that your career will be over. An example of minimization thinking is if you minimize your strengths at work and downplay every single one of your achievements.
Magnification and minimization thinking puts lenses to either magnify or minimize the situation.
7. Emotional reasoning
Emotional reasoning believes that negative emotions reflect how things are. An example of this is if you tell yourself, “I feel guilty”, emotional reasoning will make you believe, “If I feel guilty, I must have done something wrong.” Another example of emotional reasoning would be if you tell yourself, “I feel hopeless,” emotional reasoning will tell you, “I feel hopeless, therefore my problems are impossible to solve.”
Emotional reasoning is harmful because your emotions overpower the reality of the situation you are in.
8. Should statements
You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn’t. You tell yourself, “I should do this”. If you end up not completing the task, you feel awful about yourself. Should and shouldn’t make you feel pressured and resentful. If the should and shouldn’t is directed on you and you fail, you end up feeling guilty and lots of shame. If the “should” or “shouldn’t” statements are directed at someone else and they fail to meet your expectations, you feel bitter and self-righteous.
9. Labeling and Mislabeling
Personal labeling means creating a completely negative self-image based on your mistakes. An example of labeling is if you make a mistake, you tell yourself, “I am a failure” instead of “I made a mistake”. This small change in language is all of the difference in the world. “I’m a failure” makes you believe that you are a failure based on one mistake. “I made a mistake” lets you know that you made a mistake, but the mistake is not your identity.
10. Personalization
Personalization makes you see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for. One example of this if you are a parent and your child is struggling in school. If you think, “He is failing because I am a bad parent”, then you are attributing your child’s mistake to you. In reality, the child is responsible for their work.
It’s important to recognize these 10 types of negative thoughts. In the future, if a negative thought comes into your head, try to see if you can categorize it in any of these buckets. Hopefully, this exercise will help you overcome your negative thoughts at a faster rate.
