Thinking Traps
By Dr. Anna Enright
We all experience stress. The last two years, living through a Pandemic, have been particularly challenging for many of us, especially our young athletes who have had to contend with so many changes. What’s interesting about stress is that it is our PERCEPTION of stress which has the power to either increase or minimize the impact stress has on our health and wellbeing. Our brain is always taking stock of what’s happening and trying to make sense of it by making up a story about the situation. Those stories often lack evidence, but we believe them nonetheless.
Here is an example that may be familiar to you. Maybe you have had a similar situation happen. I know this resonates with me. You see someone you know walking across the street, you say hi and they don’t acknowledge you. What story would you make up about this situation? One story may be, “they are so rude! or they don’t like me”. It may spiral into, “who do they think they are? I can’t believe they would ignore me like that!”... and so on. This brings up negative feelings about that encounter. While a story that sounds more like this, “I hope they’re OK, they seemed distracted” or “they didn’t see me” would bring up more positive or neutral emotions about the situation. These reactions have consequences on how we then behave, in this case, next time we see our friend.
Although we all generate these negative stories, when negative thinking is excessive it becomes problematic and can contribute to us feeling bad. The truth is the stories we are telling ourselves are often exaggerated and inaccurate, but we tend to believe them without considering their accuracy. In the example above, unless we check in with our friend about the encounter, we won’t have the data to know which scenario is true.
There is a good reason we have this propensity toward the negative. It is an evolutionary protective mechanism. We had to be very good at scanning our environment for danger to survive when we were cave dwellers in prehistoric times. A tiger could have literally been lurking in the tall grass waiting to eat us! Now, the tigers are no longer hiding in the tall grass, but are right between our ears! It’s important to understand this wiring so we can be kind to ourselves when we end up in a negative thought spiral.
Examples of exaggerated, unhelpful thinking styles occur when we see ourselves as hopeless or describe ourselves as bad or feel responsible whenever something goes wrong. These unhelpful thinking patterns are called Cognitive Distortions. When we are caught up in one of these patterns, it can:
1. have a powerful effect on our feelings,
2. change our behavior and lead us to feeling negatively toward people,
3. make life and our future seem more hopeless.
Being stuck in a negative thought spiral is like seeing through glasses which have been spray painted. The world starts to feel grayer and different from how it is. Training our brain to notice and identify unhelpful thinking styles will help us respond more skillfully. This will lead to evaluating stress more realistically. Minimizing our negative perception of what’s going on in our moment-to-moment experience will help us chip away at the gray, so we see the world, and ourselves, in a more accurate way.
Example:
Effects of an unhelpful thinking style:
Situation: Waking up in the morning
Negative thoughts: I have so much to do today! I will never get it all done! Why is my life so busy! It’s just too much!
Feeling: Hopeless, anxious
Distortion: All or nothing thinking; overgeneralization
Response: I pull up the covers and miss my morning commitments (meetings, school, practice)
Effects of a supportive thinking style:
Situation: Waking up in the morning
Rational thought: What a busy day I have today! I have so much to do. I will need to think about what is most important and do that first. The rest can wait.
Feeling: Hopeful and less anxious which may be followed later by a sense of accomplishment
Response: Get out of bed and make a list of priorities for the day.
Thinking traps (Cognitive Distortions)
Here is a list of common thinking traps we can all fall into and ways to challenge them.
1. All-or Nothing Thinking: Seeing things in black-and-white categories. If our actions aren’t perfect, then they are seen as a failure.
Challenge: Bring in shades of gray. Work on identifying partial successes. Evaluate the situation on a scale of 0-10. Think about partial success and reevaluate, on a scale of 0-10.
2. Filtering out the Positive: Focus in on one thing that went wrong and filter out the positive events that occurred.
Challenge: Work on being as kind to yourself as you would be with a friend. Focus on all the positive things that went right in your day. For every negative thing, try to also focus on one positive thing.
3. Overgeneralization: Seeing a single negative situation as never-ending and lasting forever.
Challenge: Remind yourself this negative event (or even multiple events) are just moment to moment events and will not truly last forever. Think of past experiences when you worked through a negative event. “What evidence do I have that this is not true?”
4. Jumping to Conclusions: Making a negative interpretation without all the facts.
Challenge: Ask yourself, “What do I know for sure?” Focus on the things that you do know are true and look for the pieces of information you still need, to assess the situation more realistically.
5. Catastrophizing: Negatively exaggerating the importance of things.
Challenge: Ask yourself, “What do I know for sure? Is what I’m thinking 100% true or do I need more data?”
6. Emotional Reasoning: Assuming your negative emotions reflect the way things really are. “I feel it, therefore it MUST be true.”
Challenge: Check things out with trusted friends or family to evaluate whether your thoughts are accurate.
7. Should Statements: Motivating yourself by saying, “I should or shouldn’t” do something.
Challenge: Push back by asking yourself is it true? Where does it say that it should or shouldn’t be done? What would serve you best in this situation?
8. Personalization: Seeing yourself as the cause of a negative event for which you were not entirely responsible.
Challenge: Carefully evaluate the situation. Do you really have full responsibility for the outcome? Identify outside factors that may be impacting the outcome. (Burns, D.D 1989)
Next time you find yourself caught in a thinking trap, ask yourself the following questions:
What evidence do I have that this thought is true?
What evidence do I have that this thought is not true?
What would I tell a friend who had the same thought?
If it is true, are the consequences really that bad?
Burns, David D., MD. 1989. The Feeling Good Handbook. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc.
campusmindworks.org
If you are interested in learning more about Cognitive Distortions check out this article: Ackerman, Courtney, MA. (2021). Cognitive Distortions: When Your Brain Lies to You PositivePsychology.com.
