Resources/Thinking Errors
Questions that you might ask yourself in order to identify your thinking errors include:
- Am I jumping to the worst possible conclusion? [Catastrophising]
- Am I thinking in extreme, all-or-nothing, terms? [Black-and-white thinking]
- Am I using words like ‘always’ and ‘never’ to draw generalised conclusions from a specific event? [Over-generalising]
- Am I predicting the future instead of waiting to see what happens? [Fortune-telling]
- Am I jumping to conclusions about what other people are thinking of me? [Mind-reading]
- Am I focusing on the negative and overlooking the positive? [Mental filtering]
- Am I discounting positive information or twisting a positive into a negative? [Disqualifying the positive]
- Am I globally putting myself down as a failure, worthless or useless? [Labelling]
- Am I listening too much to my negative gut feelings instead of looking at the objective facts? [Emotional reasoning]
- Am I taking an event or someone’s behaviour too personally or blaming myself and overlooking other factors? [Personalising]
- Am I using words like ‘should’, ‘must’, ‘ought’ and ‘have to’ in order to make rigid rules about myself, the world or other people? [Demanding]
- Am I telling myself that something is too difficult or unbearable or that ‘I can’t stand it’ when actually it is hard to bear but it is bearable and worth tolerating? [Low frustration tolerance]