A Revealing Look at Thinking Errors and Cognitive Distortions

0:12 Welcome to happiness isn't brain surgery with Dr. Snipes. This podcast was created to provide you the information and tools Doc Snipes gives her clients so that you too can start living happier. Our website DocSnipes.com has even more resources videos and handouts and even interactive sessions with Doc Snipes to help you apply what you learn. Go to DocSnipes.com to learn more. Hi everybody and welcome to happiness isn't brain surgery with Doc Snipes: Practical tools to improve your mood and quality of life. Today we're going to talk about cognitive distortions and there are a bunch of them but we're going to focus on the 10 most common ones and how they can make you miserable and likewise what you can do to combat them so let's start

0:59 with what is misery well misery typically we think of as anger fear and depression those three big unpleasant emotions well anger and fear are responses to a threat it's your body saying you either need to fight or flee depression is a response to a loss or a sense of hopelessness and helplessness depression tells us that oh we're really sad that that's not there anymore that we don't have it if you never got depressed about anything not saying we want to be depressed all the time but what we're depressed or sad for a moment it shows that something was meaningful to us it doesn't need to be considered something that's it's bad depression tells us oh that was important and I'm gonna I'm sad that it's not there anymore or that things have changed when we have one of these feelings anger fear or depression

1:50 it's our brains way of telling us that there might be a problem now there's an emphasis on might it doesn't mean that there is based on prior learning experiences for example if you know you saw me and I was across the room because I tend to talk with my hands a lot and I tend to be very animated if you had a history of coming from somewhere where there was a lot of domestic violence you may think that I was angry and I was being aggressive which may trigger a fear response in you based on your prior learning but the key is to check it and say is this actually a threat right now is this is my brain interpreting what's going on correctly when we accept these unpleasant feelings

2:36 without question we often feel unpleasantness unnecessarily a lot of times our brain is wrong it says there might be a problem and but there really isn't so for example when I'm home alone at night and I hear a noise outside you know my heart starts beating a little bit faster if the dog start to bark at like crazy you know I start thinking is there somebody outside well I gotta check that you know I could sit there and be scared and be be worried and nervous all night long or I could get up and check it and go oh you know what it was just the wind and go on with my day and it wouldn't be a big thing so it's important to check yourself so we're going to talk about three examples in

3:22 this presentation just because they're common things that come up but we're also going to talk about the distortions and how you can apply them to your own thinking so the three examples were going to talk about today John saw that his wife had been frequently calling his best friend and became enraged Sally had to give a presentation and was just terrified and Heather broke up with her boyfriend and was devastated so we've got anger fear and depression here that we're going to talk about and like I said these are not going to cover all the situations but I want you to see how situations when they're not jet can lead you to unnecessary misery so look what are these cognitive distortions well cognitive means thoughts and distortions means kind of out of whack

4:11 so sometimes we think of things or think in ways that aren't exactly accurate we distort the truth so to speak they often say that truth or reality is 90% how we perceive what's going on and 10% what actually happened so 90% is a lot so our perceptions mean a lot our learning experiences mean a lot you know children when they're young and they're learning they may not understand things because they don't have those prior learning experiences so they may not realize something as dangerous and they may not get afraid when they should as adults we tend to get afraid when we don't need to so it's important to be

4:59 able to be mindful of how we're feeling and our environment to go are we safe so the first cognitive distortion is all or nothing thinking and most of us engage in this periodically when we use words like always never every single time those kinds of phrases may emphasize what's going on and it may seem like something happens a lot but that's not every single time rarely does something happen every single time or Never so you want to go and look for the exceptions so if you never take my feelings into account when you know something is happening well is that true

5:44 does that person never take your feelings into account or is it something they frequently don't do but sometimes they take your feelings into account and we want to really look at how frequent these things happen sometimes we overlook the positive and we're going to talk about that in a little while but sometimes you know somebody may take your feelings into account a lot of the time on a daily basis but then there are a couple big glaring episodes big glaring incidents where they didn't take your feelings into account and you're remembering those and forgetting all the good all the other times that the person did take your feelings into account so try to eliminate extreme words from your vocabulary instead of always or never

6:29 use the word sometimes personalization means you're taking things and saying well you made this happen you made me feel bad you're angry at me so if you're walking down the hallway at work and maybe your coworker gives you a dirty look and you may automatically take that personally and you may say oh my gosh what did i do why did i make her angry or on the other hand you may say what is that person's problem how dare they give me this nasty look I was trying to be nice either way whether it's anger or apprehension that's an unpleasant emotion that you may not need to be feeling the person may have been thinking about something and often while

7:15 Island is what I like to call it while they're walking down the hall and that facial expression may have had to do with what they were thinking about and they didn't even see you there think about it have you ever walked down the hall and just kind of not noticed what was going on because you were stuck in your own mind imagine what kind of facial expressions you make my daughter catches me with that occasionally I'll be checking my email or something and I'll look up and I'll have a look like I just swallowed a sour lemon and you know she's like why were you making that ugly look at someone said I'm like huh I didn't know I mean ugly looked at anybody and so you need to kind of pay attention not only to what other people are doing and if they do something that

8:03 makes you angry or feels hurtful or you know makes you scared that you offended them or something check it and go you know is it about me when you go through cash cashiers Lane you know if the cashier is exceptionally rude it happens you know I tried to step back and go what are three reasons besides the fact that the person just didn't like me for some reason what are three reasons this person may have been rude to me maybe they'd been having a really bad day and they just were in that kind of a mood had nothing to do with me maybe their boss had just gotten on to them and they were kind of in a funk and they were angry at their boss and it was just still bleeding over or maybe that's just the way they are I mean in their head

8:50 they live in a very dark unhappy place and they're not nice to anybody you know I try to look at what are the possible other explanations and y'all know I like the number three so I look for three explanations Asians magnification and catastrophizing so something happens and you're like oh my gosh I lost my job or I got laid off now I'm going to lose my health insurance I'm gonna lose my house I'm gonna be homeless living in my car you know you just go from zero to 120 in no time flat well that just makes you miserable how likely is it that all those things are going to happen could they happen well yeah possibly and you could get struck by lightning during the

9:35 next thunderstorm how likely is that to happen pretty darn unlikely so when you start feeling yourself getting revved up like the sky is going to fall stop yourself and go okay let's look at the evidence not how I'm feeling about what's going on but let's look at the factual evidence for and against my thought that this thing is going to end up being the worst thing in the world what is the evidence for it for and against it so I can weigh it and decide how likely is this to happen you know when I look at the objective evidence number four is your fallacy of fairness or heavens reward and they're kind of different but they're kind of the same the fallacy of

10:21 fairness is when you believe that things should happen because everything in the world is fair well hang it up it ain't everything in the world is not fair or you know we'd all be five foot eleven blond-haired blue-eyed supermodels you know it and the playing field would be level that's just not how it is it's not fair sometimes so you need to think about it in terms of what do you have and an attitude of gratitude heavens reward is a little bit different and it says that if you do something good good should come back to you it's Karma have been to reward you know it's not fair if you do good things and you don't get good things back either way however you want to look at it except

11:09 what you did get you know if you do something and you know you get a smile back maybe you were hoping for more but you got a smile that's great but what else did you get did you get a warm feeling inside did it make you feel better about yourself when you look at whether things are fair or unfair take a look at other people you know look around you you'll probably find that you're better off than a lot of other people so you know in the big scheme of things you know you've got a lot to be grateful for maybe some things aren't fair and they aren't however you can focus on that which is gonna make you miserable because you can't change it you can't make life fair or you can

11:55 choose to focus on the good things in your life and what you do have control over number five is filtering and a lot of us especially if you're depressed or you're anxious or you're angry or you just tend to be more on the negative side tend to disqualify the positive so when something good happens it's like well of course that was gonna happen and when something bad happens it's like oh my gosh disqualifying the positive also means disqualifying your good trait so you focus on all the things you do wrong but not on all the things you do right it's important to look at both of them and next week when we talk about dialectics we're gonna talk about always looking at both sides always looking at the good and the bad because things can

12:40 be going really well in some areas of your life and really crappy in a couple others so are you going to get all upset and say my life is just over its miserable cuz a couple things are going bad even though you know five other things are going pretty well or are you going to look at those things that are going well going well I've got all this stuff going for me alright we need to focus on these other couple of things and figure out how to fix them so you don't want to disqualify the positive whether it's the positive things about you the positive things that you do and the same thing is true if you are a parent or a supervisor or even a friend when you're talking to

13:26 people a lot of times we forget to give them kudos for things they do well and we only focus on the things they do wrong you didn't get your paperwork in on time or your room wasn't clean or this or that instead of going awesome job ideally you want to have three to five awesome jobs in there for every critique so you know try to start doing that each week with the people that are important to you when you see them you know congratulate them on things thank them for things make sure to give them kudos for the good things and do the same thing to yourself at the end of each day look back over the day and go what did I do that was nice what did I do that was good what did I do that helped me move toward my goals and yeah you may have

14:12 done some other things that didn't help but focus on the things that did so you because you're naturally gonna remember the things that you forgot to do or didn't do well that helps you get more balanced and when you have more balance it doesn't seem like life is so out of control and so negative number six is over generalization which is kind of like all-or-nothing but over generalization is when you take one thing and assume that every other incident is going to be that way so for example if when you were in high school you had to give a speech and you really flub the speech and it was just an awful embarrassing experience and you assume that every time you've got to get up in

14:57 front of people henceforth and forevermore it's gonna go just as poorly that's over generalization that's taking at one instance and assuming that it's going to apply to everything if somebody is unpleasant to you you know again you've got to think to yourself maybe it's a co-worker and oh that person is just the meanest most nasty person ever okay or was that a specific day in a specific episode maybe that person got up late had a flat tire you know got to work got in trouble something else happened and they were just in a funk that day so do you want to assume that they're like that always in every situation or do you want to say well

15:45 maybe that was just a bad day let's see what they're like tomorrow so try not to over general as over generalize the past does not have to repeat itself if you get into relationships you know you can say every time I get into a relationship it ends up in disaster well that's all or nothing thinking every time is one of those extreme words so you want to look for the exceptions but you also don't want to over generalize and assume that every relationship you get into is going to be a failure you want to look at each relationship that you've had and find the things that went well because you want to do those more and find the things that didn't go so well so you can work on them or avoid them in the future number seven is jumping to conclusions

16:32 or mind-reading assuming you know what somebody's going to say assuming you know what somebody wants assuming you know what their intent was can make you miserable especially if you assume that their intent is not good as malevolent so you want to get the facts what exactly was going on emotional reason a emotional reasoning is your eighth cognitive distortion and we use that a lot people use that when they're getting ready to get on an airplane for example they're afraid of getting on an airplane so they assume that it's dangerous you know they don't they haven't looked at the facts to see you know how much safer or more dangerous it is than driving which they do every day they haven't

17:20 looked at the facts to see you know how common is it for an airplane to actually have problems but they feel fearful because they've paid attention to the occasional plane crash that makes the news well the twenty thirty thousand flights a day that don't make the news aren't even registering in their mind so it's important to recognize whether you're using emotional reasoning you feel scared therefore this must be dangerous or you feel angry so therefore there must be a threat versus what are the facts so step back and go I'm feeling scared I'm feeling nervous that this is a dangerous situation what are the facts do your research look online with the advent of

18:08 the Internet you can do a whole lot more research and educate yourself now more than before now be careful make sure you use good websites and please if you're worried about a health condition stay off places like WebMD call your doctor because you will freak yourself out unnecessarily most of the time but get the facts because most of the time when we are scared about something it's not as scary as we're making it out to be in our head number 9 is blaming you made me do it well you know somebody does something and you get angry or you get sad or you get however well that's true they did something but what was your part in it did you tell them that that bothered you

18:57 did when they did it did you react to that in a helpful way did you overreact to that sometimes especially if we're in relationships whether it's a friendship or a close relationship we'll just stuff things people do things that annoy us and we kind of stuff it it's like okay whatever whatever and we get a bunch of whatever's well all those whatever's end up lining up on a list of done meringues that eventually come out somebody the person does something and it's like the straw that broke the camel's back and all of a sudden you're hitting them with this litany have done me wrong so that they've been doing for the past six months that you haven't addressed you did this you did this you did this you keep doing this well if you didn't tell them that bothered you and why or how to

19:47 address it then they may not even know so you can't hold them accountable if they do the same thing like leave the toilet seat up 12 times you can't hold them responsible for all of that because they may not realize that it bugs you or even realize that they're doing it so you need to look at what was your part in it yes people other people do things that can trigger feelings in you feelings are designed to get you to do something not to sit on it not to stew in it but to do something to fight to flee or to reflect so when you feel a feeling then it's your choice what to do

20:32 in the next moment you can improve the next moment and decide what to do so that feeling goes away or you can stew and stay stuck in it you know that's your part you choose how you continue to feel your immediate reaction that's a biological thing that comes from learning and all kinds of stuff you can't control that so don't try to control that but say okay I feel this way how can I improve the next moment if somebody is doing something that makes you unhappy or causes you problems you need to make sure to address it ahead of time if for example you know we're coming up on the holiday season and maybe you're anticipating that your spouse is going to get the kids

21:19 Christmas presents and then it comes to Christmas Eve and there are no Christmas presents and you're like you were supposed to do that that was your responsibility did you communicate that to them did you check up and make sure things were going I mean the day before Christmas or the week before he probably should have been going have you gotten the Christmas presents yet or you know I don't see anything coming in for something that's important like that you need to be aware and kind of on top of things not saying that we should have to micromanage other people but if there's something that's really important to you then you probably need to stay on top of it and number 10 is always being right if you have difficulty you get angry

22:04 when people don't accept your point of view when people don't accept your rationale or your way of doing things it can cause a lot of unnecessary misery and strife between you and other people so you want to ask how can we both be right you know politics is one example you know you may have one opinion and your best friend or your parent or somebody else has another opinion all right is it possible that both of you could be right from a certain point of view and you can agree to disagree it doesn't mean the other person is necessarily wrong it just means you don't hold the same opinions and rightness if you want to stick with that term is very subjective when it comes to

22:51 opinions and ways of doing things there are you know my daughter is working on algebra now and she solves problems differently than I do now does it mean that her way is wrong no she gets the same answer so we're both right we just go about it in a different way and far be it for me to tell her she's wrong because it's working for her so you want to be able to step back and go is there some validity to their point you know examine it and even though you may disagree it's their opinion or it's their way of doing things is it getting you to the same place okay so let's go with those examples we talked about in

23:37 the beginning John saw that his wife had frequently been calling his best friend and became enraged so what other explanations might be going on so the first thing is he jumped to conclusions he probably assumed that she was sneaking around behind him or you know whatever the case may be well maybe she was sneaking around behind him to plan a surprise birthday party for his 45th birthday oh well that's a whole different thing um he used emotional reasoning he felt angry therefore she must be doing something wrong instead of going I feel angry so let's see if it's me or if it's somebody else is doing something wrong and he used overgeneralization he assumed that

24:25 because she was calling him and when people call other people it must mean that they're in some sort of a relationship so there were several cognitive distortions there when in reality she was just planning a surprise party Sally had to give a presentation and was terrified a lot of people are terrified about public speaking even if it's just giving a presentation in front of their team so the first one was jumping to conclusions she assumed people were gonna be judging her she assumed that it was going to be a disaster she foresaw all these things that were going to happen before they even happened she used emotional reasoning she was afraid that things were gonna go poorly so she said this is a really terrifying thing to do she personalized it she may

25:17 have thought that they're gonna think I am the most stupid person in the entire world when I get up and do this presentation or they are going to you know really hate me it's going to be about me not necessarily about the material I used to sit in these long meetings where we had to get up in front of all the other directors and present our monthly report and it was a little intimidating the CEO the c-level executives the CEO the CFO to see this to see that were in there as well as all the directors so they were my peers and my superiors however you know they didn't dislike my presentation or just like me for example but the material I was presenting was boring boring is sin

26:04 and we had to hear the same basic thing from 30 different departments so yeah it got redundant and people would start getting antsy and irritable had nothing to do with me had to do with the fact that we'd been sitting there for six and a half hours so personalisation you don't want to personalize so you want to check it and go is this about me or is this about the situation and magnification she was assuming that this was just going to blow up in her face and people would notice every single mistake she made like she was under a magnifying glass in reality most people there sitting in there and they won't know if you make a mistake and even if you do you know what everybody makes mistakes so they're gonna they may feel for you

26:51 a little bit so those were some of the cognitive distortions that she used so before getting up to do that presentation she could have looked at the facts looked at you know everybody has to do this I wonder what it's like for everybody else and looked around and seen that other people when other people would do doing their presentations the audience was not engaged so when she did her presentation if they weren't engaged it wasn't about her it was about them having other stuff to do so get the facts look at it objectively like a fly on the wall take yourself out of the situation and see whether it is as scary and as awful as you're expecting it to be and finally

27:40 Heather broke up with her boyfriend and was devastated okay well it happens when you break up with somebody when a relationship ends whether it's a boyfriend or a best friend it can be devastating in this case she may have been using filtering disqualifying the positive aspects of not being in that relationship anymore or only looking at the good parts of the relationship and forgetting all the reasons that they broke up which the negatives that were there she used emotional reasoning she felt sad therefore this may be must be devastating this must be the end of the world because I feel like I just got my heart ripped out stepping back and going okay I feel really bad right now but is my world really ending will I never find

28:29 someone else chances are not happening are slim likely you're gonna find somebody else and you know repeat the process all or nothing thinking she's using that I will never ever find anybody else if I can't have this relationship I'm not going to find anybody else or I'm a total failure in relationships that's all or nothing thinking the total failure well let's look at what the other person's part was in the relationship let's look at the relationship itself what other factors contribute it contributed to it failing and you know that takes us to personalization what part did you have in it did the relationship breakup was

29:16 it all your fault was it all about you are you unlovable probably not the relationship probably broke up because it was a bad fit because of stuff on the other person's part because of stuff you know maybe her significant other was going off to college or getting deployed or something and they decided to end the relationship so it may have had to do with a lot of factors that had nothing to do with her so when you feel devastated again you want to check yourself for some of these cognitive distortions and see if your impression see if the things that you're seizing on that you're focusing on are valid and whether they include the big picture too often we just filter out and

30:03 focus on one little narrow aspect instead of looking at all the other things that could have contributed a good thing to do is write down each one of these cognitive distortions on a piece of notebook paper you know one on each one distortion on each piece or however you want to do it and review it throughout the day when you start feeling kind of antsy or angry or whatever and see if you are using any of these distortions see if you are telling yourself things using any of these distortions because our self-talk is what often keeps us stuck in misery if you like this podcast please subscribe on your favorite podcast app join our Facebook group at Doc Snipes comm slash

30:52 Facebook or join our community and access additional resources including live coaching once a week with me doc Snipes at Doc Snipes com thanks for tuning in - happiness isn't brain surgery with Doc's naipes our mission is to make practical tools for living the happiest life affordable and accessible to everyone we record the podcast during a Facebook live broadcast each week join us free at Doc's 9.com / Facebook or subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast player and remember Doc's nights calm has even more resources Members Only videos handouts and workbooks to help you apply what you learn if you like this podcast and want to support the work we are doing for as

31:38 little as 399 per month you can become a supporter at Doc's knifes calm slash join again thank you for joining us and let us know how we can help you