Thinking Distortions and Their Impact

Did you know that 45% of people experiencing homelessness suffer from mental health issues? This figure rises even higher when the person is sleeping rough. No one suffers in the same way, and that’s why we believe it is imperative to know all we can about mental health and wellbeing, and continue to raise awareness.

One thing we see a lot of at The Bridge is Thinking Distortions. Also known as Cognitive Distortions, Thinking Distortions are unhelpful thinking patterns which cause distressing feelings and may prompt behaviour which then maintains the distressing feelings. Unhelpful thinking patterns can often develop due to difficult life experiences, and result in being stuck in a cycle of distress, depression, and anxiety.

Distortions can sound rational and accurate to people on the surface, it’s only when we examine them more closely that we discover a wider pattern of unhelpful thinking. Different people will favour different types of Thinking Distortions, but may not even be aware of them.

Below are a list of the 11 common Thinking Distortions:

1. All-or-nothing thinking:

Things are seen in black and white, events are either ‘all good’ or ‘all bad’. If your performance is not perfect, you see this as a total failure.

2. Overgeneralisation:

You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.

3. Negative mental filter:

You focus on a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that it darkens your view of reality.

4. Disqualifying the positive:

You ignore and disregard positive experiences by finding reasons why they ‘don’t count’. By doing this, you retain negative beliefs of the world even when everyday positive experiences contradict this.

5. Jumping to conclusions:

You interpret something in a negative way even though there are no definite facts that support your conclusion. This could be by assuming that someone is responding negatively to you, or expecting things to turn out badly and acting as though it has already happened.

6. Magnifying or minimising:

You exaggerate the importance of some events, such as your mistake, someone else's mistake, or achievement. Or you inappropriately shrink events until they appear tiny, whether it’s your own good qualities or another person's imperfections.

7. Emotional reasoning:

You assume that your negative emotions reflect reality - I feel it therefore it must be true.

8. ‘Should’ statements:

You live life by fixed rules with no flexibility, regardless of whether or not this is appropriate for the situation you are in. You may try to motivate yourself with what you ‘should’, ‘should not’, ‘must’, or ‘must not’ do. But doing this too much makes you feel guilty as you treat yourself as though you deserve punishment. 

9. Labelling and mislabelling:

An extreme form of overgeneralisation. Instead of describing your specific error, you attach a negative label to yourself as a person. Mislabelling involves describing an event with language that is very emotionally loaded.

10. Personalising and blaming:

You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event, which in fact you were not primarily responsible for. The opposite of personalising is blaming, where you view the fault as lying entirely with someone else.

11. Distorted self-worth:

You believe that in order to accept yourself as worthy, or to simply to feel good about yourself, you have to perform in a certain way most or all of the time.

Learning to recognise and challenge Thinking Distortions can help reduce the difficult emotions like anxiety, depression, or anger, that are caused or maintained. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is a therapy based on recognising, challenging, and changing Thinking Distortions and the resulting unhelpful behaviours. It involves identifying cognitive distortions, and then countering them with more reasonable and balanced thoughts. Do this, and over time negative thoughts become less automatic, and are replaced by more helpful, balanced thinking.