5 Distorted Thinking Patterns Linked to Depression and Anxiety
By: Charlotte Allison
Tags: Thinking, Anxiety, Healing, Depression, Psychology

What you can do to change them.

Distorted Thinking Patterns

If you are suffering from anxiety and/or depression, you most likely have thinking patterns that are distorted. Your tendency is to think in extremes. Rather than somewhere in the middle. These distorted thinking patterns can keep you feeling depressed or can cause you more anxiety if not addressed.

Luckily, there are ways you can change your thinking patterns once you become aware of them. There are many different distorted thinking patterns. I have listed some of the most common ones here. Here are 5 distorted thinking patterns associated with depression and anxiety, and what you can do to change them.

1. Polarized Thinking: Also referred to as all-or-nothing thinking, or black and white thinking. Polarized thinking is thinking in extremes. For example, you are either a complete failure or a complete success. Or people are all good or all bad.

Solution: Put things in perspective. Nothing is ever that black and white. It is usually somewhere in the middle. There is a gray area. Most life events fall somewhere within that gray area.

2. Overgeneralization: Overgeneralization occurs when you reach a conclusion about an event, and then apply that conclusion to all events. For example, if you are not good at one subject in school; you conclude that you are not good at any subject. In another example, if you are rejected for a date, you conclude that every girl/guy will reject you for a date.

Solution: Realize that one negative occurrence only applies to that one situation or one person. It does not apply across the board. If you are bad at math for example, realize that being bad in a subject is specific only to math. It does not mean you aren’t good in other subjects. Likewise with dating. If you are rejected, it is just that one person who rejected you. It is not every person that will reject you.

3. Catastrophizing: When you catastrophize, you expect the worst in every situation. For example, if you scored low on one test, it means you will start to fail all your subjects, which will lead to you failing college altogether, and you will eventually have to drop out.

If your spouse is late, it must mean he/she is having an affair. Your marriage will fall apart. You will end up destitute and alone. You expect the worse to happen even if it is just a trivial matter.

Solution: Look for evidence that any of these events are happening. Does scoring low on one test really mean you are going to fail every subject and end up dropping out of college altogether? Scoring low on one test does not even necessarily mean you are failing in that class. It just means you scored low on one test.

Investigate every situation in which you expect the worst. If your spouse is late, perhaps he/she is just running late. Where is the evidence that he/she is having an affair and will leave you, and you will end up destitute? Chances are you are attaching meanings to situations that are mostly just trivial matters.

4. Personalization: This is when you take things personally, even if you had nothing to do with the situation. You think you are responsible for situations beyond your control. That it is somehow your fault. You somehow caused it all. You might even think you are responsible for somebody else’s bad mood. Perhaps your boss is in a bad mood. You think it’s because of something you said or did. That you are somehow the cause of their bad mood.

Solution: Do not take things personally. Someone else’s bad mood usually has nothing to do with you at all. It usually has to do with some other issue they are dealing with on their own. And in situations beyond your control, realize you are not that powerful that you can cause events to spin out of control. You are only human. You do not possess super-human powers in which you can cause events to happen on your own. You are not to blame for events beyond your control.

5. Mental Filtering: You interpret all events through a negative mental filter. You see things through a negative lens regardless of the situation. If something positive does happen, you write it off as an exception. Thinking it doesn’t really count. Because it doesn’t fit in with your negative view of things.

Think of this as putting on a pair of sunglasses. You see things a little differently through the lens of the sunglasses. This is how you always see everything, through filtered lens. When you take the sunglasses off, you see circumstances more as they really are, instead of through your negative mental filter.

Solution: Realize you have been looking at life through your habitual negative thinking. You can choose to see events and situations differently. You want to turn the positive events that you think are exceptions into you new way of thinking and experiencing things. Rewrite your script to include a positive view of life events.

Summing It Up

The first step is to recognize what kind of distorted thinking is causing you anxiety or causing you to feel more depressed. When you recognize what kind of thinking is keeping you stuck in depression or causing you more anxiety, you can do something about it.

Then you can reframe the situation. Try to see things in a different light. Look for evidence to determine if what you are thinking is true or not. Look for other explanations of what is happening, instead of jumping to conclusions. It might even help to write down what you are thinking. Then write out a few other possible explanations for what is happening.

Finally, no matter how bad things seem, they usually are not as extreme as you think they are. Look for the gray area. Your issue, no matter how bad you might think it is; most likely falls somewhere in the middle. There is usually a workable solution to your problems. Keep things in perspective.