Hi I'm Dr. Tracey Marks a psychiatrist
and I make videos on mental health education
and self improvement.
Today I want to help you identify automatic thoughts
that you have that can affect how you feel
about yourself and others.
We call these cognitive distortions.
We all have them to some degree and the more you have
and the more rigidly you stick to them,
the more habit they can wreak in your life.
Here are eight common cognitive distortions.
And this graphic comes from my 2020 calendar
that's hot off the press and available on Amazon.
It's more than a calendar,
it's 52 weeks of self improvement tips.
I group the tips into themes for each month,
and each week you have something you can do
to help you with that theme.
For example, February is about self love
so each week you get a suggestion for what you can do
to improve how you feel about yourself.
Also, the images are motivational quotes
to inspire you for the month.
So go grab a copy for yourself and a friend.
The link for the calendar on Amazon can be found
at DrMarksCalendar.com.
The first cognitive distortion is Filtering.
Filtering is when you focus on the negative
to the exclusion of the positive.
So something happens in all you can see
is the negative and you just can't appreciate
other possibilities.
You may even make excuses in your head
for why alternative possibilities aren't likely.
Black and White thinking.
Here is where you think things
are all good or all bad, and you can't see
the middle gray area, and this is very inflexible thinking.
Overgeneralization.
With this thinking you exaggerate
or take things to the extreme.
Mind Reading.
With mind reading you make assumptions
about what's going to happen, or you make assumptions
about what someone thinks.
And this is very dangerous ground to walk on
when you become an expert on what other people are thinking.
You may be a very sensitive person
or an intuitive person who picks up on vibes
but just because you sense a negative vibe
doesn't mean you know what the person is actually thinking,
because keep in mind, what you assume about
what someone thinks is colored by your own issues
and life experiences, we call that projection.
Projection is a defense mechanism
where you project your own thoughts and motivations
on to someone else and believe it's really
what the other person thinks.
What's the difference between a cognitive distortion
and a defense mechanism?
The short answer is they're very similar concepts
but just seen from two different perspectives.
Defense Mechanism is a psychoanalytic concept
where your unconscious mind uses behaviors
to fend off unwanted emotions.
In this case, unconscious doesn't mean that you're asleep,
it means that it's beyond your awareness
an automatic like a reflex.
Psycho analytically based therapy helps make
the unconscious conscious so that you can appreciate
and process your emotions in real time.
Cognitive distortion is a concept
from Cognitive Behavior Therapy perspective.
With CBT it's not about what you unconsciously think,
the distortions are automatic, but they're not beyond
our awareness in a way that makes them unreachable
without lots of therapy.
CBT isn't interested in what happened in your past
to shape your beliefs, it's about looking today
and how you think and what you do
and how you change what you think and what you do.
Okay, I veered off a little, but I didn't want to skip
over what I thought could be an obvious question
that you may have.
So back to the distortions.
Number five is Emotional Reasoning.
And this is when you believe that your emotions
are based in the truth, but emotions are not fact,
they're your response to the facts.
So a way to break past this kind of thinking
is to get into the habit of looking at the facts
before you respond or you draw a conclusion.
Should Statements.
With this you over focus on how things should be,
you use words like should, ought to and must,
and this creates unrealistic expectations
and ultimately leads to disappointments,
resentment, failure.
Catastrophizing.
Catastrophizing involves expecting the worst case scenario
for any given situation.
And this is a common distortion used in people
who have health anxiety or panic attacks.
Whenever you feel light headed
it means that you're gonna faint
and if you stand conscious for too long,
you may stop breathing and die.
So you're afraid to be alone because if you get dizzy
you need to have someone around to revive you.
Now, there's nothing scientific about that conclusion.
Yes, dizziness can be an early sign that
you're gonna faint,
but there's many other non serious reasons
that you can feel dizzy as well.
But taking the thought to the point of death
because you stop breathing is the ultimate catastrophe
that's not even realistic.
If you tend to think this way,
you may not start out with the most catastrophic thought
but you assume negative outcomes
like losing your job or people hating you
and then over time, it progresses to become more
and more extreme and unrealistic.
Then there's Personalization.
With this, you think everything is about you.
Let's say you get a call from work
and you're told that you can't come in
because something caused a power surge and the servers down.
You immediately worried if it's because
you didn't shut down your computer,
or if it's because you didn't tell your team
not to do the massive data upload overnight.
And maybe these are things that could really
cause such an outage, but probably not,
you just think that you're at the center
of bad things somehow, and that people are thinking badly
about you because of it.
Do you recognize any of these in yourself?
I'll have a follow up video on how
to challenge these thoughts.
But for now, mould over and think about which ones apply
to you so that you'll be ready to address them
in the next video.
See you next time.