Feeling Good

02The Ten Mind Traps Ruining Your Mood

Have you ever walked through a carnival funhouse and stood in front of those warped, wavy mirrors? In one mirror, your head looks the size of a watermelon while your legs are tiny toothpicks. In another, you appear stretched out like a piece of taffy. When you look at these reflections, you do not immediately burst into tears and lament that your body has suddenly been horribly deformed. You know, without a shadow of a doubt, that the mirror is distorting reality. Yet, when our minds do the exact same thing to our self-image and our perception of the world, we believe the reflection completely. Dr. Burns identifies ten distinct cognitive distortions—the funhouse mirrors of the mind—that are exclusively responsible for generating negative emotions. By learning to name and spot these first five traps, you can rob them of their power over you. The first and perhaps most common distortion is All-or-Nothing Thinking. This is the tendency to evaluate your personal qualities, achievements, and experiences in extreme, black-and-white categories. There is no middle ground, no shades of gray, and absolutely no room for human error. If a situation falls short of perfect, you view it as a total failure. Consider a dedicated student who has maintained straight As for three years. One semester, she receives a B on a difficult calculus exam. Instead of viewing this as a minor blip in a stellar academic record, her All-or-Nothing Thinking kicks in. She instantly brands herself a total failure, convinced she is not smart enough for college. This distortion is particularly dangerous because the universe rarely deals in absolutes. No one is entirely brilliant or entirely stupid, entirely attractive or entirely ugly, completely successful or completely worthless. When you force the complex, nuanced reality of life into absolute categories, you set yourself up for inevitable disappointment and self-hatred. Next, we encounter the insidious trap of Overgeneralization. When you overgeneralize, you arbitrarily conclude that a single negative event is the start of a never-ending pattern of defeat. The vocabulary of an overgeneralizer is heavily populated with words like "always," "never," "everyone," and "nobody." Take the example of a young man who asks someone out on a date and is politely declined. A rational response would be disappointment regarding that specific interaction. However, under the spell of Overgeneralization, he thinks, "I am never going to find anyone. No one will ever want to date me. I am always going to be alone." He takes one isolated incident of rejection and stretches it across the entire timeline of his future. The pain of a single rejection is manageable, but the imagined pain of a lifetime of loneliness is unbearable. By recognizing when we are taking one data point and drawing a sweeping, catastrophic curve through it, we can bring ourselves back to the present reality. The third distortion is known as the Mental Filter. Think of this as wearing a pair of glasses with specially designed lenses that filter out anything positive, allowing only negative information to reach your conscious awareness. You pick out a single negative detail in any situation and dwell on it exclusively, until your vision of all reality becomes darkened, much like a single drop of ink that discolors an entire beaker of water. Suppose you deliver a major presentation at work to a room of fifty colleagues. Afterward, forty-nine people offer you glowing praise, shaking your hand and congratulating you on a job well done. However, you noticed that one person in the back row was yawning and looking at their phone. If you are caught in the Mental Filter, you will completely ignore the forty-nine compliments and agonize over that one yawn for the rest of the week, convinced the presentation was a disaster. You filter out the overwhelming evidence of your success to obsess over a microscopic perceived failure. Closely related to the Mental Filter is the fourth trap: Disqualifying the Positive. This is a particularly destructive mental habit because it goes beyond simply ignoring good things; it actively transforms them into bad things. It is the psychological equivalent of reverse alchemy, turning gold into lead. When someone compliments a person suffering from this distortion, they immediately shoot it down. If told they look nice, they think, "They are just saying that to be polite." If they do a great job on a project, they tell themselves, "Anyone could have done it, I just got lucky." Disqualifying the positive allows you to maintain a negative belief about yourself even when you are presented with overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It is a defense mechanism that perversely protects your depression, ensuring that no joy or pride can ever penetrate your mental armor. Finally, we arrive at Jumping to Conclusions, which comes in two distinct flavors: Mind Reading and Fortune Telling. In Mind Reading, you arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you do not bother to check if it is true. You walk past a friend on the street, and they do not say hello. You immediately assume, "They are mad at me, I must have done something wrong." In reality, they might just be deep in thought or not wearing their glasses. Fortune Telling, on the other hand, is when you predict that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact. You might think, "I am going to fail this driving test, I just know it," and as a result, you become so crippled by anxiety that you actually do fail, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. These first five traps form the foundation of our daily misery, but there are five more lurking in the shadows, waiting to distort our reality even further.

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