People can experience unhelpful emotions such as depression or anxiety which are often preceded by a number of self-statements and thoughts. These thoughts often exhibit specific patterns which can be unhelpful or even detrimental to the deterioriation of our mental health.
Mental Filter
Filtering in and filtering out process which forms a tunnel vision where a person focuses on only one part of the stiutation, completely ignoring the rest.
Usually this means looking at the negative parts of a situation and forgetting the positive parts. The whole picture becoming coloured by what may be a single negative detail.
Jumping to Conclusions
Assuming that wek now what someone else is thinking (effectively attempting Mind reading) and making predictions about what is going to happen in the future (predictive thinking).
Personalisation
Blaming yourself for everything that goes wrong or could go wrong, even when you may only be partly responsible (or not responsible at all). You might be taking 100% responsibility for the occurrence of external events.
Catastrophising
Blowing things out of proportion by viewing the situations as terrible and dreadful, even though the reality is that the problem is quite small.
Black and White Thinking
Seeing only one extreme or the other. Things are either right or wrong, good or bad. There is no in-between or gray areas.
Shoulding and Musting
By saying âI shouldâ or âI mustâ we can put unreasonable demands or pressures on ourselves and others. These can place unrealistic expectations that would never be met.
Overgeneralisation
Taking one instance in the past (or present) and imposing it on all current or future situations. Using terms like âYou alwaysâ or âEveryoneâ or âI neverâ are examples of overgeneralisation.
Labelling
We label ourselves and others when making global statements based on behaviour in specific situations.
Emotional Reasoning
Basing your view of situations (or yourself) on the way you are feeling at the given time. The only evidence that something bad would happen is that you feel like something bad is going to happen.
Magnification and Minimisation
You magnify positive attributes of other people and minimise your own positive attributes. It is as though you are explaining away your own positive characteristics.