11 Common Errors in Thinking

According to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, we often feel anxious, upset and annoyed because of certain errors in our thinking. These are faulty ways of looking at life which are automatic - and also very common. However, if we identify and change our way of thinking then our feelings are reactions will be much healthier. These errors in thinking include the following:

1. All –or – Nothing Thinking: Where the person evaluates themselves, others, situations and the world in extreme categories. It doesn’t allow for grey areas in thinking.  “I’m a terrible parent.”

2. Overgeneralizing: Thinking that because a bad experience happened once, then that’s the way it’s always going to be. For example, “I know I’ll fail my driving test. I’ve already failed it three times”.

3. Discounting the Positives: Ignoring the positive aspects of a situation and saying that they don’t count. For example, generally getting  good marks in school – but not praising yourself for that. One paper gets some negative feedback and you tell yourself you’re a useless student. The positive results are ignored.

4. Jumping to Conclusions -This has two aspects to it: mind reading and fortune telling.

•  Mind reading
 is thinking you know what others are thinking without any evidence. For example, a person with social anxiety assumes her colleagues think she’s useless at her job.
•  Fortune telling is predicting that the future will turn out badly. For example, going for a routine mammogram and concluding that you have cancer.

5. Magnifying / Minimising: Evaluating the importance of a negative event, or the lack of evidence of a positive event, in a distorted manner. (Blowing things out of proportion.) For example, concluding that your sister doesn’t like you anymore because she forgot to send a  birthday card.

6. Emotional Reasoning: Believing that something must be true because it feels true. For example, when your boyfriend is an hour late in arriving for a film, you conclude that he isn’t interested in you. You discount the fact that, maybe, the bus was late, or he was delayed at work.

7. Labelling: Using a label (bad mother, idiot) to describe a behaviour - and then taking on board everything associated with that label. Seeing things is global terms. For example, a friend says or does something thoughtless. You label then them as “a terrible friend” and now you interpret anything they say in a hostile and negative way.

8. Personalization and blame: Where a person totally blames themselves for something that’s gone wrong when it is not their fault. For example, a soccer team member thinks she’s “put the coach in a bad mood” because she missed a goal. She discounts the fact that the coach may have been annoyed before the game started. The opposite is to totally blame another for something. For example, a wife may blame her husband for the break up of their marriage and not admit that she had any part in it.

9. Catastrophizing: (Similar to fortune telling) Dwelling on the worst possible outcome. For example, an employee had to do a presentation. He became obsessed with thoughts of performing badly, letting the company down, losing his job, then losing his home and family.

10. Making “should” or “must” statements:  Where the person has a fixed idea of how they, others or life should be. These become “rigid demands”. When they person is disappointed (as will inevitably happen) they become very upset and overestimate how bad this will be for them. For example, a student berates themselves for only getting 89% in an exam – when they wanted all their results to be in the 90s.

11. Selective abstraction: Dwelling on one negative detail instead of seeing the bigger picture. For example, a girl gets a haircut and 8 of her friends say they love it. One person says they preferred her old style. The girl thinks about that for hours and hours and wonders if she should have changed her hairstyle.

These 11 cognitive errors are all habits of thinking that are deeply ingrained. The good news is, like any habit, these patterns of thinking can be broken and discarded through awareness and practice.

The web never encourages us to slow down!

Not all distractions are bad. As most of us know, if we concentrate too intensively on a tough problem, we can get stuck in a mental rut. But if we let the problem sit unattended for a time, we often return to it with a fresh perspective and a burst of creativity. Research by the Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis indicates that such breaks in our attention give our unconscious mind time to grapple with a problem, bringing to bear information and cognitive processes unavailable to conscious deliberation. We usually make better decisions, his experiments reveal, if we shift our attention away from a mental challenge for a time.

The constant distractedness that the net encourages—the state of being, to borrow a phrase from T S Eliot, “distracted from distraction by distraction” — is very different from the kind of temporary, purposeful diversion of our mind that refreshes our thinking. The cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively. Our brains turn into simple signal-processing units, shepherding information into consciousness and then back out again.

What we seem to be sacrificing in our surfing and searching is our capacity to engage in the quieter, attentive modes of thought that underpin contemplation, reflection and introspection. The web never encourages us to slow down. It keeps us in a state of perpetual mental locomotion. The rise of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, which pump out streams of brief messages, has only exacerbated the problem.


There’s nothing wrong with absorbing information quickly and in bits and pieces. We’ve always skimmed newspapers more than we’ve read them, and we routinely run our eyes over books and magazines to get the gist of a piece of writing and decide whether it warrants more thorough reading. The ability to scan and browse is as important as the ability to read deeply and think attentively. What’s disturbing is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of thought. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for further study, it’s becoming an end in itself — our preferred method of both learning and analysis. Dazzled by the net’s treasures, we have been blind to the damage we may be doing to our intellectual lives and even our culture.


>> more at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/7967894/How-the-Internet-is-making-us-stupid.html