And my brain lied to me again?!
Cognitive Distortion
Have you ever heard the term “cognitive distortion?” It’s the way behavioral psychology tells you that your own thoughts lie to you.
The first person to come up with the cognitive distortion theory was Aaron Beck. A bit later, David Burns made it popular.
Some of the most frequent ways our brains deceive us -
- Filtering: I give out an interview and it goes OK except for one small thing. I end up convinced that it was terrible. Filtering happens any time one detail filters out everything else.
- Polarized thinking: if I don’t get something perfect, then I suck. Polarized thinking is black or white, while reality is every shade and a blend of colors.
- Jumping to conclusions: someone is in a bad mood and my conclusion is that they hate me. Jumping to conclusions convinces me that I can determine another person’s thoughts or feelings, or predict things with no real basis to do so.
- Catastrophizing: my brain tells me that the only possible scenario is the worst-case scenario and that it will all happen to me.
- Personalization: my brain tells me that whatever happened was because of me.
- Control fallacies: my brain believes it’s in complete control of everything (you must be in a bad mood because of something I said), or incomplete control of nothing (what’s the point of hard work if I am going to fail anyway?)
- The fallacy of fairness: this is when the fact that something isn’t fair fills me with anger and resentment. The fact is, things will very often not go my way.
- Blame: This is when we hold others responsible for how we feel. He couldn’t make me happy, she makes me feel like a failure, he makes me feel like I can’t get anything right.
- Emotional reasoning: this convinces me that my feelings determine truth. If I am angry, then that means you wronged me. The fact is, our emotions do not reflect the truth. They just reflect how we feel.
- Global labeling: one person does one thing and that is enough information for me to determine that he is cool or a loser or a bad parent.
- Always being right: when being right is more important than another person’s feelings, or their friendship, or the possibility that they might be right even in the presence of me laying out a good argument.
There are many, many other cognitive distortions: we underestimate our resilience, our attention is biased which makes our conclusions wrong, we don’t remember things the way they happened, we have unrelentingly high standards, & now a hit of laziness strikes the writer while making an unaccomplished attempt (yet, I’m still writing) of sounding witty wants to end this at 2.55 AM zzz…
Ayyy….The conclusion is our brain cannot be trusted. Period.
