Are your thoughts hurting you?

Our emotional health depends on our ability to make good, reality-oriented judgments about what is going on in the world around us. When we experience positive events we need to interpret them this way so that we have an appropriate emotional response to the situation. Similarly, when we experience negative events we also need to give proper meaning to these events, in order to deal with the situation or problem in a reality-based manner.

We all have unique lives, with different experiences, parents, friends, and so on. We have developed our own individual way of interpreting the world and these interpretations are often colored by our wounds and needs and not always based in reality. As a result, most of us engage in varying degrees of distorted thinking. We develop our own core beliefs about how the world operates and when various situations present themselves these beliefs lead us to automatic thoughts. It is important to examine these thoughts and examine our cognitive distortions so that we make healthy decisions and become the best version of ourselves.

Examples of common cognitive distortions are: 1) Overgeneralizations, 2) Mental filters, 3)Tendency to disqualify the positive, 4) Jumping to conclusions, 5) All-or-Nothing thinking, 6) Magnifaction or Minimization of events, 7) Should statements, 8) Personalization, and 9) Labeling.