Cognitive Distortions/ Limited-Thinking Patterns
1. ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING (also known as POLARIZED THINKING): You see things in
black and white categories. If your performance fails short of perfect, you see yourself as a total
failure. There's no middle ground, no room for mistakes.
2. OVERGENERALIZATION: You reach a general conclusion based on a single incident or piece
of evidence. You exaggerate the frequency of problems and use negative global labels.
3. FILTERING: You focus on the negative details while ignoring all the positive aspects of a
situation.
4. CATASTROPHIZING: You expect, even visualize disaster. You notice or hear about a problem
and think, "What if tragedy strikes?" You inappropriately exaggerate the importance of things.
5. MAGNIFYING: You exaggerate the degree or intensity of the problem. You turn up the volume
on anything bad, making it loud, large, and overwhelming.
6. SHOULDS: You have a lot of ironclad rules about how you and other people should act. People
who break the rules anger you, and you feel guilty when you violate the rules. You try to
motivate yourself with "shoulds" and "shouldn'ts," as if you had to be punished before you could
be expected to do anything. The emotional consequence is guilt.
7. PERSONALIZATION: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event or
someone's reaction for which, in fact, you were not necessarily a consideration or an important
factor. You assume that everything people do or say is some kind of reaction to you. You also
compare yourself to others, trying to determine who is smarter, more competent, better looking,
and so on.
8. MIND READING: You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you
don't bother to check this assumption out. Without their saying so, you know what people are
feeling and why they act the way they do. In particular, you have certain knowledge of how
people think and feel about you.
9. EMOTIONAL REASONING: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the
way things really are: "I feel it, therefore it must be true."
10. LABELING AND MISLABELING: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of
describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: "I am a loser." When someone
else's behavior rubs you the wrong way you attach a negative label to him or her.
11. SELECTIVE ATTENTION & SELECTIVE MEMORY: When you pay attention to information
that confirms your beliefs and ignore other information that may contradict your beliefs.
Selective memory is when you only remember certain pieces of information that confirm what
you believe.
From Feeling Good by David Burns, M.D.; Thoughts and Feelings by McKay, Fanning, & Davis; & Shyness & Social Anxiety
Workbook by Antony & Swinson
CHALLENGE YOUR THINKING ERRORS:
Identify an automatic thought that causes you stress:
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Label thinking error(s) if applicable:
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Generate replacement thought(s):
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From Feeling Good by David Burns, M.D.; Thoughts and Feelings by McKay, Fanning, & Davis; & Shyness & Social Anxiety
Workbook by Antony & Swinson
From Feeling Good by David Burns, M.D.; Thoughts and Feelings by McKay, Fanning, & Davis; & Shyness & Social Anxiety
Workbook by Antony & Swinson