Negative thinking patterns

 1. Polarization, often known as dichotomous thinking:

Dichotomous thinking occurs when complicated situations are oversimplified to the point where they become black or white, yes or no, good vs bad (or me versus them) concerns. This all-or-nothing mentality makes it difficult to address situations with complexity or room for compromise. A prominent example of detrimental dichotomous thinking is the belief that "there is no second place" (i.e., you must be the absolute best to be deemed successful).

2. Emotional Intelligence:

Emotional reasoning occurs when a person insists that something is factually true despite the fact that their only proof is their own feelings. Someone who is engaged in emotional reasoning is difficult to engage with productively since their reasoning is based on unpleasant feelings rather than logic. The emotional reasoner begins with the assumption that their unpleasant sentiments must be genuine and justified just because they exist, and then constructs a story to support that assumption. "I'm worried about going to school, so it must be dangerous," would be an example of emotional thinking.

3. Excessive generalization:

Overgeneralization refers to focusing on a single unfavorable aspect or incident and exaggerating its relevance in your life. For example, when a waiter breaks a glass while clearing a table, they shout, "I'm the most useless waiter to ever live!" This depressing thought is out of proportion to the event that sparked it. Someone could only get such a conclusion by overgeneralizing their entire career in the light of one minor blunder.

4. Marking:

Putting negative labels on yourself, others, and things around you is another prevalent form of destructive thought pattern that many people engage in without even realizing it. If someone continuously perceives oneself as "a loser," "stupid," or "a bad father," they can eventually grow into that mold because their negative perception allows them no room to live outside of or evolve beyond such labels.

5. Making Hasty Conclusions:

Most of us have made a wrong assumption at some point in our lives. When someone suffering from mental illness comes to a negative conclusion about something—usually themselves—it can be incredibly difficult to alter or change that belief.

6. Mental filtering:

Mental filtering occurs when someone decides (consciously or unconsciously) to remember only the negative aspects of a scenario. Mental filtering is demonstrated by an unhappy athlete who forgets their many outstanding plays and instead complains about one blown assignment and how it cost their team the game.

7. Tarot Card Reading:

Another sort of negative thought pattern is continuously forecasting that things will go wrong.

Pessimism projected onto the future can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy in which your pessimistic picture of the future is so strong that it interferes with your capacity to behave in a way that leads to positive consequences.For example, if a student believes they will fail an upcoming examination, they will not bother studying, resulting in a failed test.

8. Mind Reading:

Fortune-telling and mind-reading may appear to be fantastic paranormal talents, but when it comes to cognitive distortion, neither is especially helpful. In this context, mind reading involves assuming you know exactly what someone else thinks and feels, particularly what they think and feel about you. Negative mind reading behavior might be assuming someone hates you because they gave a brief, hasty response to a question (when possibly they were just flustered by something unrelated).

9. Exaggeration or Catastrophism:

Most of us have done this at a heated time. Magnification, often known as catastrophizing, simply means exaggerating a problem. Catastrophizing is when you allow a terrible taxi ride to spoil your entire holiday.

10. Inability to be wrong:

Everyone wants to feel right, but this desire becomes a cognitive distortion when it overpowers facts, logic, and material reality. Allowing oneself the space to be forgiven and grow is essential for growth, including the growth required for mental health recovery. If you can never be wrong in the first place, there is no room for progress.

11.Control Illusions:

A control fallacy might present itself in two ways. One is that you are depressed because you have no control over anything in your life and hence have no ability to change it. The other is that you are depressed because you have complete control over your life and are hence totally responsible for any unfavorable or challenging events.

12. Fallacies of Fairness:

When someone is grappling with a fairness fallacy, the age-old saying "the world's not fair" is commonly uttered. Analyzing situations in terms of how equitable or unjust they are may be a good sociopolitical exercise, but it is frequently ineffective in terms of personal mental health.

13. Fallacies of Change:

A change fallacy is believing or presuming that someone or something will eventually change to meet your desires. It all comes down to projecting your own needs and aspirations onto the environment around you.

14. Reducing or Discounting:

Not all negative thought patterns revolve around negative thoughts. Another type of cognitive distortion arises when someone fails to see and appreciate positive aspects of their life, instead ignoring or marginalizing them. This inability to see the positive permits negative emotions to develop uncontrolled. Minimizing your accomplishments by blaming them entirely on "luck" is an example of minimizing.

15. Personalization and Self-Loathing:

You are experiencing the cognitive distortion known as personalization when you make situations or details that have nothing to do with you all about yourself, your feelings, or your role in matters. A child blaming themselves for their parents' divorce is a common form of personalizing.

16. Implications:

Negative thinking can be exacerbated by using words like "should" or "must." Someone who gets worried when chatting on the phone, for example, may berate oneself because they believe they "should" be able to make a simple phone conversation without feeling uneasy. This reduces their ability to understand that it's okay to feel nervous, preventing them from performing the effort of genuinely managing with anxiety. Instead, they are futilely distressed that the fear exists at all.

Not every pattern of negative thought fits cleanly into one of the above descriptions, and two or more forms of cognitive distortion frequently coexist. In other circumstances, one sort of negative thinking will directly lead to another, resulting in larger and more complex patterns that might take a lot of effort and help to break. 

Outreach. (2021, November 19). Negative Thought Patterns and Depression. Sage Neuroscience Center. https://sageclinic.org/blog/negative-thoughts-depression/

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