Thinking Errors
Thinking errors are habitual mental shortcuts that bend the truth about you and your life. Learn eight of the most common ones, check which show up for you, and practice rewriting them.
Shortcuts that bend the truth
Your mind handles enormous amounts of information by taking shortcuts. Most of the time that works fine. Under stress, though, the shortcuts start bending things in predictable ways, and the bent version gets delivered to you as plain fact. These predictable bends are called thinking errors. Everyone has them; they are habits, not character flaws. And like any habit, they lose power once you can see them coming. Use this worksheet when a mood feels heavier than the situation seems to explain. Often a thinking error is doing the extra lifting.
Eight patterns worth knowing
All-or-nothing thinking. Everything lands as either a total success or a complete failure, with no middle ground. One missed workout becomes a ruined week. Mind reading. You treat your guess about what someone is thinking as confirmed fact. A coworker walks by without saying hi, and you decide she's annoyed with you. Catastrophizing. Your mind sprints to the worst possible outcome and settles in as if it had already happened. A note from your boss saying "got a minute?" turns into an afternoon of rehearsing being fired. Overgeneralizing. One bad moment gets stretched into a permanent rule, usually wearing the words always or never. A single awkward date becomes proof that dating never works for you. Shoulds. Rigid rules about how you and everyone else must think, feel, and act. When you break them you feel guilty; when others break them you feel resentful. "I should be able to handle this alone" is a classic. Labeling. Instead of describing what happened, you stamp an identity on it. Forgetting a deadline becomes "I'm useless" rather than "I missed one." Discounting positives. Good things get filed under luck, low standards, or people being polite, so they never count. "They only praised my work to be nice." Personalization. You take the blame for outcomes that were never fully yours to control. A friend seems flat at dinner, and you spend the drive home wondering what you did.
Which ones show up for you?
Read back through the list and check every pattern you've caught in the past couple of weeks. Most people check several, and some travel in pairs.
Catch one thought
Write down one negative thought from the past few days, in the exact words it used.
Name the error
Which pattern, or patterns, is this thought running? Naming it creates a little distance between you and the thought.
How true does it feel?
Before you rewrite anything, rate how believable the original thought feels right now.
Rewrite it
Write a fairer version of the thought: what someone level-headed, who knew all the facts, would say. Aim for balanced rather than falsely positive. The rewrite only works if you can actually believe it.
Re-rate the original thought
Read your rewrite once more, then rate the original thought again. Any drop, even a point or two, means the pattern is loosening.
Reflect
Take a minute to look at what happened between your two ratings.
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