- I've been meaning to tell you this for a while now,
so here it goes, I've started therapy.
It's not easy to admit that publicly
but I think we need to work
on de-stigmatizing caring for our mental health.
For me and many others,
therapy starts with addressing our irrational thoughts.
No, this is not gonna be a negative video.
I'm simply going to share
the 10 most common destructive thought patterns
that we all succumb to as humans.
Try identifying which categories your thoughts fall into
to prevent them from ruining your mood,
What color is this block?
Is it white or is it black?
Well, you might be thinking it's neither or it's both
and you'd be right.
It's grey, it's in the middle.
It's a mixture of two separate things.
There's nuance here.
When you're dealing with all or nothing thinking however,
you lose sight of this nuance.
You choose to see the image as an absolute
which just isn't reality.
By using this type of dichotomous vocabulary
you lose the ability to describe yourself
and even the world.
You are not just a pure failure or pure success,
you my friend, are a gray square.
Have you ever been broken up with, cheated on, ghosted?
Yeah, me too.
When you're overgeneralizing,
you can take those feelings of heartbreak,
sadness, and insecurity and think
if my partner doesn't love me then nobody could love me.
This is a distortion of reality
and is not only demoralizing, but also flat out untrue.
Just because one person didn't love you
doesn't mean you can find love from your family,
friends, coworkers or another romantic partner.
Humans love slapping labels on things.
Heck in this video, I'm labeling 10 cognitive distortions.
However, labeling comes with some risks
especially when it comes to evaluating our own performance.
It's easy to get a bad grade on a test
and label yourself a failure
while you may have been on successful there,
you can't use that as the official barometer
for your entire life.
In fact, many hyper successful people were failures first.
Steve jobs got fired from Apple
then came back to create the iPhone.
Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard
and then became the richest person in the world.
Oprah was fired from her job as a news anchor
before becoming the biggest TV show host of all time.
Had any of these people label themselves as failures,
they were have never become the success as they are today.
A word does not define you.
A mental filter is an opposite to overgeneralization
but with the same negative outcome.
It's when we take one small negative event
and focus on it exclusively.
Sometimes I'll post a video
and scroll through the comments section
blinded to the thousands of positive comments.
At that point, the critical comments all seem valid
while the positive ones don't really count.
Essentially mental filtering causes us to silence
large swaths of positive information coming our way.
In order to fight this and get an authentic view of reality,
we really have to remind ourselves to refocus
on the full picture.
Imagine your walking down the street
and you spot someone you know.
You go to wave and say hello,
but realize they're completely snubbing you.
You jumped to the conclusion
that this person doesn't care about you,
doesn't like you, has no interest in speaking to you.
In reality, this person just lost their job.
Their relationship of 10 years has just ended
and there are only thinking about themselves
and how bad their life currently is.
They didn't even notice you.
We all come to thousands of conclusions every day.
Just make sure you have all the information
before jumping to them.
- Jump to conclusions.
- Have you ever been out in the woods
hunting for food when a saber tooth tiger
leaps out of a cave and lunges at your throat?
Didn't think so, but our ancestors sure experienced that
which is why they developed razor-sharp survival mechanisms
to identify potential threats.
Today we've made our world a much safer place to live.
However, our anxiety still thrives
but instead of truth threats like bears, bears.
We're now reacting to a spider in the tub.
Yes, spiders can be dangerous, but 99% of the time
the spider crawling up your shower curtain is harmless.
Our horror and screams from seeing a tiny critter
is magnification.
It's a cognitive distortion where we magnify
the potential threat of a situation
to unrealistic proportions.
Think phobias.
You're scrolling through Instagram
and notice your partner's ex has liked their recent photo.
All of a sudden your emotions kick into high gear
and you begin to fear your partner's cheating on you.
Why would their ex be liking their photo?
I knew they'd been talking, they're getting back together,
are they already back together?
Freeze, you just fallen victim to emotional reasoning.
The quick jolt of jealousy and emotional insecurity
you might've had just created a lifetime movie
in your imagination.
Emotions are a crucial part of what it means to be human
but the reality is that emotions can be misleading
especially when we're angry.
Just because we feel a sense of infidelity
We have these idealized versions of ourselves and others
that are often impossible to live up to.
We target should statements at people
like she should have been nicer, or they should pay me more.
We target them at ourselves.
I shouldn't have eaten that extra slice of pizza
or I should have gone to bed earlier.
These statements can take judgemental forms
extending beyond the word should,
must, never, need, ought, can't, have to.
These words breed guilt, frustration, and anger.
Know that you cannot control others
but you can be kinder to yourself.
You pride yourself on being punctual to work.
On the day of the big meeting,
you get in your car and out of nowhere
there's a thunderstorm
just as you're turning onto the on-ramp,
the big rig in front of you flips over
blocking all of the lanes.
You wind up getting to work an hour late
and miss the whole meeting.
It might feel like you're to blame
and you personalize this mistake.
When in reality, you have no control over the weather,
no control over the truck,
certainly no control over the cleanup.
The reality is that this was an unpredictable event
and the world is a complex place where control is limited.
This is the most toxic thought that I have
and it happens frequently.
Discounting the positive
means ignoring genuinely great things that you've achieved.
For example, in reality, I should feel proud
of all the years I spent working to become a doctor.
I went to an accelerated medical program.
I did my residency.
I studied for thousands of hours
to earn the title of doctor,
but I write off these achievements as nothing special,
even at times, comparing myself to my father
who also became a doctor, but did it twice,
once in Russia, once again in America as an immigrant
in a new language.
This is a prime example of discounting the positive
and I'm working hard to recognize
that celebrating one's accomplishments
doesn't have to be considered conceited or arrogant.
Here's the most offensive question I get asked as a doctor,
click here to check that video out and as always stay happy.
(upbeat music)