Thinking Traps

Have you ever felt hopeless or anxious about something and had a hard time thinking logically about a situation? You might have encountered a thinking trap! Thinking traps (also known as cognitive distortions) are patterns of thinking that people tend to get caught in that tend to cause negative perceptions that might lead to experiencing anxiety or depression (Shreevastava & Foltz, 2021). Thinking traps act like a magnifying glass – often making a situation much more amplified than the situation is in actuality. Much like a magnifying glass, thinking traps distort our perception and volume of how we see things. There are several types of thinking traps that may be helpful for you as you navigate your emotional brain, such as: 

·         Emotional reasoning: believing “I feel this way so it must be true”

·         Overgeneralization: drawing conclusions with limited and negative experience

·         Mental filter: focusing on limited negative aspects and not the excessive positive ones

·         Should statements: expecting things or personal behaviour should be a certain way

·         All or nothing: a binary way of thinking where you consider anything short of perfection as failure

·         Mind reading: concluding that others are reacting negatively to you, without any basis in fact

·         Fortune telling: predicting that an event will always result in the worst possible outcome

·         Magnification: exaggerating the outcome of certain events or behaviour

·         Personalization: holding oneself personally responsible for events beyond one’s control

·         Labeling: attaching labels to oneself or others

·         Using emotion for reasoning: if it feels true, it must be true

We are all vulnerable to these, even if we don’t experience significant anxiety or depression. We hear these sorts of things a lot in our culture, and it tends to rub off on us. A common example we might experience is when failing a test, we believe that we are a bad student or bad at that subject. This would be an example of all or nothing thinking, and as you can imagine, this could make a big impact on how we think about ourselves, which might cause poor self-esteem, depression, or other mental health effects!

 Here is a fun Ted Talk that explains some of the more detailed science behind why we are so likely to get stuck in these thinking traps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XFLTDQ4JMk

It is hard to perceive our problems in any other way sometimes, but if we are aware of these concepts, perhaps we will have an upper hand in managing these traps!

Please reach to us at Center Street Psychology, as we provide uniquely tailored therapeutic plans and interventions to support you and collaborate on your personal wellness goals. We are inclusive clinic, located in Calgary, Alberta that provides in-person and virtual psychological services across Canada in the evenings and weekends. Please text or call 403-399-5120 to talk to our Director of Client Care, Amy, who will guide you through the in-take process.

Written by: Tyler Schamehorn

References: Shreevastava, S., & Foltz, P. (2021). Detecting cognitive distortions from patient-therapist interactions. Proceedings of the seventh workshop on computational linguistics and clinical psychology: Improving access, 151-158. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.clpsych-1.17