Five cognitive distortions worth knowing by name

Cognitive distortions are habits of thinking that make a situation look worse than the evidence says. The idea comes from cognitive behavioural therapy. Most of this list is David Burns’s, from The Feeling Good Handbook.

Longer lists run past ten. We picked the five we catch ourselves in most.

The five

All-or-nothing thinking

If I do not ace this presentation, I am a complete failure. Anything short of perfect counts as failure in this one. Ask what the partial truth is.

Catastrophising

You treat the worst outcome as the likeliest one. Your boss hasn’t replied to a message, so you must be getting fired. Write down what’s most likely to happen next to the worst case, and read the two together.

Mind reading

Everyone at the party thought I was boring. You can’t know what they thought. What would you ask them if you could?

Personalisation

A friend cancels your plans and you decide they must be angry with you. Personalisation puts you at the centre of something that was mostly down to other things, like their week or their boss. List two other reasons they might have cancelled.

Shoulds

You push yourself with should, must and ought. I should be further along in my career by now. Swap the should for "I would like to" and read the sentence again.

Naming it is most of the fix

A distorted thought passes itself off as a plain description of what’s happening. Once you can say "that’s catastrophising", you can ask the question that goes with it.

Practise on somebody else’s thoughts first

A distortion is easier to spot in a sentence that isn’t yours, so start with other people’s thoughts before you try your own.