DISTORTED THINKING* 1. All-or-nothing thinking: You look at things in absolute, black-and-white categories. 2. Overgeneralization: You view a negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat. 3. Mental filter: You dwell on the negatives and ignore the positives. 4. Discounting the positives: You insist that your accomplishments or positive qualities don’t count. 5. Jumping to conclusions: You conclude things are bad without any definite evidence:
(a) Mind reading: You assume people are reacting negatively to you.
(b) Fortune-telling: You predict that things will turn out badly. 6. Magnification or minimization: You blow things way out of proportion or you shrink their importance. 7. Emotional reasoning: You reason from how you feel: “I feel like an idiot, so I must be one.” 8. “Should” statements: You criticize yourself or other people with “shoulds,” “shouldn’ts,” “musts,” “oughts,” and “have-tos.” 9. Labeling: Instead of saying “I made a mistake,” you tell yourself “I’m a jerk” or “a loser.” 10. Blame: You blame yourself for something you weren’t entirely responsible for, or you blame other people and overlook ways that you contributed to a problem.
