in today's video i'm going to be talking about the cognitive distortion of
magnification and minimization what it is
how it contributes to anxiety and depression and what you can do to stop it
hi everyone does it ever feel like you have different standards or expectations of
other people than the expectations and standards that you have for yourself if so you might be
using the cognitive distortion of magnification and minimization which is a relatively common
cognitive distortion so today's video is a continuation of our series of videos on
cognitive distortions and biases and thinking but before we get into magnification and minimization
just a couple of disclaimers to go over i'm a registered psychologist in the province
of british columbia canada and this video is for informational purposes only it is not intended as
a substitute or replacement for advice from your doctor or mental health professional
now with those things out of the way let's start talking about magnification and minimization
so this cognitive distortion has kind of the two components the first is magnification and
in magnification what tends to happen is you tend to exaggerate your mistakes or your setbacks
and you tend to magnify other people's achievements so for example that person has
so many followers on twitter they're so popular whereas for me i took the wrong bus the other day
i'm such an idiot now at the same time the person also engages in minimization and what happens with
minimization is that we tend to minimize our own achievements and minimize other people's mistakes
or setbacks so something like yeah sure i have a good job but i'm totally unqualified for what i'm
doing and it's only a matter of time until they find out that i'm an imposter and they fire me
whereas for someone else i might think yeah sure that person lost their job but it was probably
just unfortunate office politics that they got caught up in so the result of magnification and
minimization is that you always come out looking and feeling inferior to other people but why
does this happen now one possibility is that we have distorted perceptions of what we're doing
versus what other people are doing i call this the the facebook or the instagram effect where
we're all well aware of all of the problems and all the things that are going wrong in our lives
but the only information i get from other people or much of the only information i
get from other people is based on the highlight reel that they're posting on their social media
so they're posting all these things about successes and great places that they're
going and awesome things that they're doing and so it becomes really easy for me to assume that
wow that person's life is going so well they've got it all together
whereas for me i know about all of the problems all of the things that are going wrong in my life
and it doesn't even feel like i can compare to them so therefore based on kind of this facebook
or instagram effect my life is full of problems and setbacks whereas other people seem to be doing
so much better in life than i am now another way that magnification and minimization works is that
we tend to develop different standards or different expectations for ourselves versus other
people and so what often happens is that there's a tendency to set really high standards for myself
so i'll set really high often unrealistic standards for me whereas i have reasonable
standards for other people so the result is that it seems like i'm going to have a whole lot more
failures than others and far fewer successes but this isn't because i'm more of a failure or that
other people are more successful but this is because i have different standards for myself
which makes it difficult for me to feel good about how i'm doing relative to the standards that i
have for other people so one way of thinking about it is to imagine a high jump contest
and in this high jump contest one person sets the bar at six feet and everybody else's bar is
set at three feet now although that first person may be able to jump higher than everybody else
they're likely going to have many fewer successes than other people because the standard is so much
higher so because their bar is so much higher you know every once in a while they may clear it but
they're going to be knocking down that bar a lot whereas for people who are setting the bar at
three feet it's really easy to just keep getting over that bar and they don't have nearly as many
failures it's not because they're better jumpers or the better high jumpers it's just that their
bar is set so much lower so the more i fail to achieve these high standards for myself
the worse i feel about myself and this can fuel
depression so if i recognize that i'm engaging in this magnification and minimization what can i do
about it how do i fix it well the first thing is to recognize when you're actually engaging
in magnification and minimization and then once you've identified that you're doing it
focus on having the same scale for everybody yourself included so one thing you can do
is to imagine a scenario in which you feel disappointed with a score that you got on a test
and in that scenario imagine someone else telling you that they received the exact same mark
would you tell them that they had completely failed that they were a total idiot
well if not then you're likely using a higher and unrealistic standard for yourself than you
are for other people now somewhere along the lines we developed this sense this perception that being
harsh or more critical of ourselves was a good thing because it would motivate us to
push ourselves harder or try to achieve more however all it really does is the opposite
and i've discussed this a lot more in a video that i've talked about with regards to coaching style
and i'll leave a link to it up above if you want to take a look at that video but it really does
dovetail nicely with this notion of magnification and minimization
so the key is to figure out a scale of what you would see as good enough for other people
and to make sure that you're using that same scale for yourself so that's it for magnification and
minimization i hope that makes sense i'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas about this so
please leave me some comments in the comments section down below if you've been enjoying my
videos and would like to see more please hit that subscribe button and notification bell
and you'll be alerted every week when i post a new video so that's all for this week's video
thank you for making it all the way to the end of this video and i will see you in the next one