Cognitive distortions that keep you from achieving all you want

Dear Mat,

As you navigate through life, you will desire things. You don’t know exactly what to desire because you fear defining your goals very precisely—this would mean becoming aware of failure or success, both equally seemingly uncomfortable to the present self. Your desires will also be significantly swayed by the wants of people around you, what you see on social media, and broader social trends and norms.

Sometimes you may feel lost and directionless. And your distorted mind will keep making up huge houses of stories you tell yourself, that are often limiting and restrictive. If you fail to see through the distortions of those stories, you will fall prey to them (the default), believe their persuasive narrations, and stand still without fulfilling your real desires.

When you finally strip down all the layers of clutter that have taken over your consciousness as you grew up, you will get closer to finding out your desired situations in life. Then you can merely take the next smallest step to arrive at the destination, like a speed boat turning on the engine ready for departure. Below is a list of cognitive distortions as a helpful reminder (source: Feeling Good, David D. Burns):

1. All-or-nothing thinking is the foundation of perfectionism. It leads to fearing any flaw, as it makes you view yourself as a complete failure, causing feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness.

Absolutes don't exist in reality. Trying to fit your experiences into rigid, absolute categories will likely lead to constant depression, as your perceptions won't align with the nuanced nature of the real world.

2. Overgeneralization: This occurs when you draw broad conclusions from a single event, assuming that one negative experience predicts an endless pattern of similar outcomes.
3. Mental Filter: This distortion occurs when you focus solely on negative aspects of a situation, ignoring any positive elements. By allowing only negative information to enter your consciousness, you create a skewed perception where everything seems negative. This unconscious filtering process leads to a biased view of reality, often referred to as selective abstraction.
4. Disqualifying the positive: This is the habit of dismissing or downplaying positive experiences. Instead of acknowledging good things, you find ways to interpret them negatively. This distortion goes beyond simply overlooking positives; it actively transforms them into perceived negatives.
5. Jumping to conclusions: You arbitrarily jump to a negative conclusion that is not justified by the facts of the situation.

You assume others are judging you negatively, and you're so certain of this that you don't bother to verify it. This mindset can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as your actions based on this assumption may inadvertently create the very situation you fear.

6. Magnification and Minimization: This distortion involves exaggerating the significance of your flaws, fears, or mistakes (magnification) while downplaying your positive qualities or achievements (minimization). It's like looking at yourself through a warped lens, making negatives seem larger and positives smaller than they really are.
7. Emotional reasoning. You take your emotions as evidence for the truth. One usual side effect of emotional reasoning is procrastination.
8. Should statements. You try to motivate yourself by saying "I *should *do this" or "I *must *do that." These statements cause you to feel pressured and resentful ("musturbation").
9. Labeling and Mislabeling: attaching rigid labels to yourself or situations based on isolated incidents. You're a complex, ever-changing individual, not defined by single actions or experiences. Think of yourself as a flowing river rather than a fixed statue. Mislabeling occurs when you use exaggerated or emotionally charged language to describe events, often leading to disproportionate reactions.
10. Personalization. You assume responsibility for a negative event even when there is no basis for doing so. You have confused *influence *with control over others. What the other person does is ultimately his or her responsibility, not yours.

And as Seneca put it in “On the shortness of life”:

“But learning how to live takes a whole life, and, which may surprise you more, it takes a whole life to learn how to die.”