Negative thinking defined

Also known as "Cognitive Distortions"
I found these on a flyer and thought they were useful in identifying types of negative thinking.


All or Nothing Thinking
You see everything in black or white, no grey areas. If your performance is not 100%, you think you're a complete failure.

Overgeneralization
You see a single negative event as a pattern of never-ending defeat.

Mental Filter
You find some negative detail to dwell on exclusively. Eventually that's all you see - the single negative detail, rather than putting things into perspective.

Disqualifying the Positive
You think that positive experiences don't count for some reason or another. This allows you to walk around with a pessimistic outlook that has no basis in reality.

Jumping to Conclusions
You see everything in a negative light and come to negative conclusions about things without having any evidence that confirms your beliefs.
You mind-read, thinking that someone is reacting negatively towards you without finding out whether this is in fact the case.
You tend to predict that things will turn out badly before the event takes place and accept this as a fact.

Magnification or Minimization
You exaggerate your failures and short comings and others apparent success. You also shrink things in your mind until they become insignificant (Such as your good qualities and talents and others failings or imperfections).

Emotional Reasoning
You assume the negative feelings you have towards something reflects the way things are. I feel it, therefore it must be true.

Should Statements
You beat yourself up with "shoulds and shouldn'ts" to motivate yourself into doing things as if it is the only way to motivate yourself. The result is that you end up feeling guilty about all the things you "should or shouldn't" have done. When you aim the "shoulds and shouldn'ts" at others you become resentful and frustrated, even angry.

Labelling and Mislabeling
Extreme overgeneralization. Instead of describing your failure or shortcoming you rather give yourself a label, like "I'm just a loser". When someone offends you or reacts negatively towards you, you give them a negative label like "He's such a prick".

Personalization
You blame yourself and see yourself as the cause of some external negative event that you were, in fact not responsible for.