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- Understanding thinking traps and their underlying causes is key to making better decisions and enhancing our mental wellbeing. By recognising these distorted thought patterns and actively working to counteract them, we can achieve clearer thinking and more positive outcomes.
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Mar 3, 2020 · Rather than asking yourself how to eliminate negative thoughts, instead ask how to get out of aimless thinking traps for better mental health.
- Black-And-White Thinking
- Filtering
- Catastrophizing
- Over-Generalization
- Labeling
- Personalization
- Should Statements
- Emotional Reasoning
- Control Fallacies
- Fallacy of Fairness
This trap occurs when we only look at situations in terms of one extreme or the other. A situation is either good or bad, success or failure – there is no middle ground. And if you fall short of your expectations, you view yourself as a total failure. But, in reality, most situations are somewhere in the middle – missing the gym once doesn’t mean y...
Similar to black and white thinking, filtering involves only paying attention to the negative aspects of a situation while ignoring all the positive. When you only focus on the negatives, you end up viewing the entire situation as negative and so, in your mind, everything is negative. This stops us from looking at all the aspects of a situation and...
This trap involves imagining that the worst possible thing is about to happen, and predicting that you won’t be able to cope with it when in reality the worst-case scenario usually never happens and even if it did you’d probably be able to cope. This cognitive distortion is also known as magnifying, and can also emerge as its opposite, minimizing. ...
Over-generalization is when you conclude that a single negative event is actually part of a series of unending negative events. If something bad happens, you believe it’s likely to happen again and again. Example: If you have one bad date and then conclude you’re a terrible dater who won’t ever find love.
An extreme form of generalization, labeling occurs when you attach a negative label about yourself or someone else rather than acknowledge it was just a single event or mistake. Everyone makes mistakes and we’re way too complex to be described by one word. Example: “I’m a failure” instead of “I failed that time”
Personalization is a distortion where you believe that everything others do or say is some kind of direct, personal reaction to something you’ve said or done. You end up taking everything personally when in reality it’s nothing to do with you. Additionally, you might also see yourself as the cause of some negative external event that happened even ...
This is when you have ironclad rules for how you, or others, should and shouldn’t behave. When our expectations fall short, we feel disappointed, frustrated, anxious, even angry with ourselves. You might think that these shoulds and shouldn’ts ‘rules’ are helping to motivate you but in reality they end up preventing you from taking meaningful steps...
One of the most common thinking traps we fall into is emotional reasoning: taking our emotions as evidence for the truth. When you use emotional reasoning, whatever you’re feeling at the time is believed to be true automatically and unconditionally, regardless of the evidence. This can be really harmful because it creates a loop: you think somethin...
This thinking trap involves two similar beliefs about being in complete control of pretty much everything in your life. The first type is called external control fallacy, where we see ourselves as victims of fate with no direct control over our lives. The second type of control fallacy, internal control, occurs when we assume we are completely resp...
If you suffer from the fallacy of fairness, you often feel resentful because you think that you know what is fair, and no one is abiding by it. It may sound obvious to say, but “life isn’t always fair.” People who go through life assessing whether something is ‘fair’ or not will often end up feeling resentful, angry, and unhappy because of it. Beca...
Mar 1, 2022 · Thinking traps are patterns of thought – usually with a negative swing – which prevent us from seeing things as they really are. Otherwise known as cognitive distortions, thinking traps are often deeply ingrained in our psyche.
Sep 23, 2016 · Building upon this, the author invokes Horn’s logic and dialectical traps as a lens for understanding human roles and the prevalence of issues with ecological identities, within social ecological traps.
- Keith G. Tidball
- kgtidball@cornell.edu
- 2016
Sep 15, 2022 · 3 common thinking traps and how to avoid them, according to a Yale psychologist. Updated December 21, 20221:40 PM ET. By. Elise Hu. , Michelle Aslam. 17-Minute Listen. Playlist. Enlarge this...
Here are ten common psychological thinking traps, along with their names, reasons why we fall for them, and strategies to overcome them: All or nothing thinking: This trap involves thinking in extremes and seeing things as either completely right or completely wrong.
