10 Unhelpful Thinking Styles

When we experience an unhelpful emotion, it is usually preceded by a number of unhelpful thoughts or misconceptions about ourselves and others. These thoughts are called unhelpful thinking styles.

People tend to use unhelpful thinking styles out of automatic habit. It is something that happens out of our awareness, so it's not your fault. However, when people consistently and constantly use some of these styles of thinking, they can often cause themselves a great deal of emotional distress.

We all have automatic thoughts.

Automatic thoughts can be split in to two parts :

1) Unrealistic & Unhelpful Thoughts

2) Realistic but Unhelpful Thoughts

Below are 10 unhelpful thinking styles.

Can you identify any thinking patterns or styles that you often use?

Mental Filter

This thinking style involves a "filtering in" and "filtering out" process — a sort of "tunnel vision," focusing on only one part of a situation & ignoring the rest. Usually this means looking at the negative parts of a situation & forgetting the positive parts. The whole picture is coloured by what may be a single negative detail.

Jumping to Conclusions

We jump to conclusions when we assume that we know what someone else is thinking (mind reading) & when we make predictions about what is going to happen in the future (predictive thinking).

Personalization

This involves 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.

Catastrophizing

This occurs when we "blow things out of proportion". We view the situation as terrible, awful, dreadful, and horrible, even though the reality is that the problem itself is quite small.

Black & White Thinking

This thinking style involves seeing only one extreme or the other. You are either wrong or right, good or bad and so on. There are no in-betweens or shades of grey (haha).

Should-ing and Must-ing

Sometimes by saying "I should..." or "I must..." you can put unreasonable demands or pressure on yourself and others. These statements are not always helpful & can sometimes create unrealistic expectations.

Overgeneralization

When we overgeneralize, we take one instance in the past or present, and impose it on all current or future situations. If we say "You always..." or "Everyone...", or "I never...", then we are probably overgeneralizing.

Labelling

We label ourselves and others when we make global statements based on behaviour in specific situations. We might use this label even though there are many more examples that aren't consistent with that label.

Emotional Reasoning

This thinking style involves basing your view of situations or yourself on the way you are feeling. For example, the only evidence that something bad is going to happen is that you feel like something bad is going to happen.

Magnification and Minimization

In this thinking style, you magnify the positive attributes of other people and minimize your own positive attributes. It is as though you're explaining away your own positive characteristics or achievements as though they're not important.

- We CAN overcome these unhelpful thinking styles if we take the time to process and analyze our thoughts with both open hearts and open minds. By looking at situations non-judgementally, we can avoid unhelpful thinking styles. This helps to rid our hearts of rumination, resentment, false notions, toxic thoughts, and negativity.

Changing the way we think about ourselves, others, and situations, will change our entire outlook on life. This leads to overall increased feelings of contentment, happiness, & reduced feelings of anxiousness.

We can do this, buds.