Published 11th September, 2023, Anxiety, Depression and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and Anxiety

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Unhelpful thinking styles

Is it negative, or is it positive? Do we catch ourselves telling ourselves certain things? This is the key right there: you have to adopt a certain level of mindfulness so you can catch the loops; these loops are the loops that you continually tell yourself, which will affect your mental health, your emotional balance, and your right to manifest the life of your dreams.
I want to go through some different types of thinking styles, and when you have read this blog post, or even while you are reading this blog post, I want you to reflect on what thinking styles affect you. And could you catch the loops? Do you already notice the loops? Let's run through them.

All or nothing thinking

Today, I'd like to talk about a personal favorite of mine, which is thinking styles. What do we mean when we think about thinking styles? When we talk about these styles, it indicates to us what our self-talk is. This is called black-and-white thinking, so for example, it could be something like "If I'm not perfect, I have failed" or "Either I do it right or not at all." With these two examples, the latter is a positive quote; however, many in my niche see it as a negative. It is high self-belief and willpower. However, the masses see it as "No middle ground," which puts too much pressure on the individual, which, in turn, could raise anxiety levels.

Over-Generalising

How this is seen is a pattern based upon a single event or being overly broad in the conclusions we draw. To give you an example this reflects our cognitive bias towards seeking meaning and order in the world, sometimes leading to erroneous or hasty judgments.

Mental Filter 

You would imagine a "mental filter" would be someone who doesn't have a filter, which, if honest, has got me in trouble in the past. But having a mental filter means only paying attention to certain types of evidence, so you only notice your failures rather than your successes. This is very common with most individuals; we seem always stuck on what is going wrong or what we don't have, but we seem to not focus on what we have and what is going very well. The truth is once you move your mind from thinking about what you do have, the things you don't have become smaller and smaller.

Disqualifing the positive

Again very simliar to "Mental Filter" disqualifing the positive is where you discount the good things that have happened or that you have done for some reason or another.  This mental pattern can lead to a skewed and pessimistic perception of oneself and one's life, despite evidence to the contrary.

Jumping to Conclusions

There are two key types of jumping to conclusions: 

Mind Reading:- Imaging we know what others are thinking

Fortune Telling:- Predicting the Future.

Magnification (Catastrophising) & Minimisation

Society calls this or has labelled this as "Drama Queen" however, it's more along the lines of blowing things out of proportion (catastrophising), or inappropriately shrinking something to make it seem less important. 

Emotional Reasoning 

This is where you assume that because we feel a certain way, what we think must be accurate; you then feel embarrassed, so you say, " I must be an idiot," and it is a heavy negative self-talk.

Should/Must 

This is where an individual is struggling with guilt, so they use critical words like "should," "must," or "ought," which can make us feel guilty or like we have already failed. This creates frustration because we often apply "shoulds" to other people, resulting in frustration.

Labelling

This is a very common unhelpful thinking trait, where we assign labels to ourselves or other people. For example "I am a loser" "I'm completely Useless" "I'm such an idiot"

Personalisation "this is my fault"

Blaming yourself or taking responsibility for something that wasn't completely your fault. Conversely, blaming other people for something that was your fault.

Over the years, we tend to develop unhelpful thinking habits like those described above. We might favor some over others, and some might seem far too familiar, and that's okay; it's all about awareness. Once you can identify your unhelpful thinking styles, you can start to notice them - they often occur just before and during distressing situations. Once you notice them, that can help you challenge or distance yourself from those thoughts and see the problem differently and more helpfully.

Challenging Biased Expectations

One way to address biased expectations is to challenge them "head-on." In cognitive behavioral therapy, this is also called "disputation." Remember that our thoughts and expectations are often opinions we have picked up or learned rather than facts. Therefore, they can be questioned and should not be something we unquestioningly accept if they are causing us distress.
To challenge or dispute your biased expectations means to dissect them, evaluate how accurate or likely they are, examine what evidence you base your expectations on, and look at any positive things you may be ignoring. In this way, you are like a detective or a lawyer. You are trying to understand how realistic your expectations are and putting things in perspective. Challenging your biased expectations is something other than what you should do in your head, which can get messy and confusing. The best way is to write it down. To help you work through the challenging process step by step, on paper, making things more transparent and helpful.
Here at the Takeover, we tend to use "Thought Diaries." The thought diaries guide is to help you through how to get your biased expectations out on paper. The thought diary will first ask you to identify your biased expectations. To help you do that, first, ask yourself the following questions:-

What is the situation I am in?

Then:-

What am I expecting?

What am I predicting?

What do I see happening in this situation?

What conclusions am I making?

After you have written these down, you'll then need to ask yourself:-

How strongly do I believe this will happen? Rate the strength of your belief between 0 and 100%

What emotions am I feeling?

How intense are these emotions? Rate the intensity of your emotions between 0 and 100%

This will then take you past the first section, which takes you onto the second section of your "Thought Diary" this is when you are ready to begin to challenge your biased expectations. Here are the questions asked in your thought diary to challenge these types of negative thoughts:-

What is the evidence for my expectations?

What is the evidence against my expectations?

How likely is it that what I am expecting will actually happen? (Rate 0-100%) 

What is the worst that could happen?

What is the most likely thing that will happen? 

How does it affect me when I expect the worst? 

If the worst did happen, what could I do to cope?

How else could I view the situation? 

Are there any positives in me or the situation that I am ignoring?

The ultimate aim of doing this thought diary is for you to develop more realistic expectations. once you have explored the anwsers to the above "challenging" questions in your thought diary, ask yourself also:- 

What would be a more realistic expectation?

The final step is then to:-

Re-Rate how much I now believe the original biased expectations I was making,

Re-Rate the intensity of the emotions that I was originally feeling

Work through the entire thought diary to challenge your biased expectations. You will likely experience a decrease in your belief in the pessimistic predictions you were making and the intensity of your emotions.

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