05 - Unhelpful Thinking Styles - CCI

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Module 5 Unhelpful Thinking Styles

Unhelpful Thinking Styles

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Unhelpful Thinking Styles: More Details

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Module Summary

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About the Modules

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Module 5: Unhelpful Thinking Styles

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Unhelpful Thinking Styles

When a person experiences an unhelpful emotion (eg, depression or anxiety), it is usually preceded by a number of unhelpful self-statements and thoughts. Often there is a pattern to such thoughts and we call these, "unhelpful thinking styles". One of the things we have noticed is that people use unhelpful thinking styles as an automatic habit. It is something that happens out of our awareness. However, when a person consistently and constantly uses some of these styles of thinking, they can often cause themselves a great deal of emotional distress. We are now going to describe a range of unhelpful thinking styles. A summary of all the styles are provided on this page, with further details on each style provided on subsequent pages. It might be a little too much to read everything at once, so perhaps you might want to read through this page and then choose one or two to read in detail. Can you identify any thinking patterns and styles that you often use?

Mental Filter This thinking styles involves a "filtering in" and "filtering out" process ? a sort of "tunnel vision, "focusing on only one part of a situation and ignoring the rest. Usually this means looking at the negative parts of a situation and forgetting the positive parts, and the whole picture is coloured by what may be a single negative detail.

Jumping to Conclusions We jump to conclusions when we assume that we know what someone else is thinking (mind reading) and when we make predictions about what is going to happen in the future (predictive thinking).

Personalisation This involves blaming yourself for everything that goes wrong or could go wrong, even when you may only be partly responsible or not responsible at all. You might be taking 100% responsibility for the occurrence of external events.

Catastrophising Catastrophising occurs when we "blow things out of proportion"., and we view the situation as terrible, awful, dreadful, and horrible, even though the reality is that the problem itself is quite small.

Black & White Thinking This thinking style involves seeing only one extreme or the other. You are either wrong or right, good or bad and so on. There are no in-betweens or shades of gray.

Shoulding and Musting Sometimes by saying "I should..." or "I must..." you can put unreasonable demands or pressure on yourself and others. Although these statements are not always unhelpful (eg "I should not get drunk and drive home"), they can sometimes create unrealistic expectations.

Overgeneralisation When we overgeneralise, we take one instance in the past or present, and impose it on all current or future situations. If we say "You always..." or "Everyone...", or "I never..." then we are probably overgeneralising.

Labelling We label ourselves and others when we make global statements based on behaviour in specific situations. We might use this label even though there are many more examples that aren't consistent with that label.

Emotional Reasoning This thinking style involves basing your view of situations or yourself on the way you are feeling. For example, the only evidence that something bad is going to happen is that you feel like something bad is going to happen.

Magnification and Minimisation In this thinking style, you magnify the positive attributes of other people and minimise your own positive attributes. It's as though you're explaining away your own positive characteristics or achievements as though they're not important.

Note: Some of these styles might sound similar to one another. They are not meant to be distinct categories but to help you see if there is a kind of pattern to your thoughts. Just choose a few that might be most relevant to you.

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Unhelpful Thinking Styles: More Details

1. Mental Filter (Selective Abstraction)

This is a "filtering in" and "filtering out" process. You can think of a mental filter as a sort of "tunnel vision" focusing on only one part of a situation and ignoring the rest. Usually this means looking at the negative parts of a situation and forgetting the positive parts.

Here is an example: Maybe you are out with your partner having a romantic dinner, and at the end of dinner you have a disagreement about whether to leave a tip or not. Perhaps you stew on this disagreement in the car all the way home. What do you think the effect of this thinking style will have on the way you feel?

Notice that in this example you are dwelling on a single detail out of the many details that occurred during the entire night. Notice that the detail you are dwelling on happens to be negative. You have excluded other details of the whole picture, which means that you are not remembering all the other positive experiences of the night. If you focus on this negative bit, then it is likely that you'll keep experiencing the negative feelings that go along with it.

This process also happens with the way we remember things. All the memories of our life experiences are stored in our brains. Have you ever thought of what would happen if we remembered everything all at once? We'd be pretty overwhelmed! It is natural that mental filtering occurs when we try to remember things. However, research has shown that when a person is depressed, they often remember events that are associated with negative unhelpful feelings. If they keep dwelling on these memories, how do you think they would feel?

Can you think of a situation where What were the thoughts that went What feelings did you experience

you used this thinking style?

through your mind?

consequent to your thinking?

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Module 5: Unhelpful Thinking Styles

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2. Jumping to Conclusions

Most of us would have heard the phrase "You're jumping to conclusions!" meaning that a conclusion is being made without really knowing if there is any evidence to support it. Although we might like to think that if we "have a hunch" about something it is usually right, there are times when we are not right. There are times that we keep jumping to the wrong conclusion, or the conclusions are usually negative. When we do this consistently then we can cause ourselves quite a bit of distress. There are two ways in which we often jump to conclusions ? mind reading and predictive thinking.

Mind Reading

As the name suggests, this is where we jump to conclusions because we assume that we know what someone else is thinking, or we know the rationale behind someone else's behaviours. This happens to be a very common style of thinking.

Have you ever had this experience? You are talking to someone, and during the conversation they look at their watch? Perhaps you've thought, "They must think I'm a really boring person", or "they don't want to be here with me." If you jumped to these conclusions without looking closely at all the evidence, such as the fact that the person is expecting an important phone call soon, do you think you'd end up feeling happy or distressed? Let's try another example: Your boss asks to see you. You instantly assume you know why she wants the meeting, "She's going to tell me that I'm not good enough for this job" or , "she's upset with the way I am doing things." If you believed your interpretation, which has been based on your mind reading, would you be happy or anxious?

Often these conclusions are a reflection of how we think about ourselves, eg, "I think I'm boring", "I think I'm not good enough", "I always do things wrong". Often we jump to the conclusion that because we think poorly of ourselves, then others must too.

Predictive Thinking We can also jump to conclusions when we start making predictions about what is going to happen on some future occasion. This is a very common way to increase anxiety and stress. These are often predictions where you overestimate the negative emotions or experiences you are going to encounter. Think through this example with us. Someone has asked you to give a talk to a group of people, you might think "I'm going to get in there and forget what I'm supposed to say, stumble over my words, and completely stuff up the presentation, and this will be terrible". You believe this despite the fact that you have delivered many successful presentations in the past. How might you feel if you believe this?

Can you think of a situation where What were the thoughts that went What feelings did you experience

you used this thinking style?

through your mind?

consequent to your thinking?

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?Psychotherapy?Research?Training

Module 5: Unhelpful Thinking Styles

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3. Personalisation Can you think of some occasions when something hasn't gone quite as you wanted, or the way you expected, and you've blamed yourself totally for what's happened? The toast burns at breakfast, and you blame yourself not the toaster, your child plays a wrong note at a concert, and you blame yourself for not making him practice harder. Without realising it, you relate external negative events to something you have or have not done.

When you personalise something, you take total responsibility for external events occurring, and ignoring other important factors. As a consequence you end up blaming yourself for everything that goes wrong or that could go wrong - even when you may only be partly responsible, or not responsible at all. If you were to consistently say to yourself, "This is my fault", "I'm to blame" ? how do you think you'd start to feel? Carrying 100% of the responsibility is a rather large burden to bear, and one that's likely to leave you feeling discouraged or overwhelmed.

Can you think of a situation where What were the thoughts that went What feelings did you experience

you used this thinking style?

through your mind?

consequent to your thinking?

Centre for C Ilinical

nterventions

?Psychotherapy?Research?Training

Module 5: Unhelpful Thinking Styles

Page 5

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