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16 Cognitive Distortions That Are Creating Irrational Anxiety In Your Life
Applying moral attributions to neutral things.
By Brianna Wiest
A cognitive distortion is a way your mind convinces you that something is true when it really isn’t. It is also sometimes called “thinking error,” and tends to run rampant in people who struggle with anxiety and depression. Here, the main ones that are probably impacting the way you experience your life:
1. Believing everything you feel is real. Emotional reasoning is thinking everything you feel is true. It is treating emotions like an oracle; not being able to separate reality from how you feel about reality. When you have a feeling, you label it, or assign to it a cause. Sometimes, this works: when you feel happy around someone, you can deduce that you like them. However, feelings are not always informed by reality: they are are created by a host of different triggers, some psychological, some environmental, many physiological. They can be the result of fears, projections, past ideas or beliefs. Feelings are always valid, as in something you are definitely experiencing, but they are not always true, as in not always a reflection of reality. Feelings are not facts.
2. Assuming challenges mean you’re being “tested.” When people face repeated or unexpected challenges, some believe they are being “tested,” as though there is an external conscious force creating obstacles to see how they will respond. This is a way to make sense of what’s happening that externalizes responsibility. Most of the time, the obstacle at hand is the direct result of poor habits or decision making.
3. Fearing a nonexistent “fall from grace.” This is what happens when we fear that if we become too happy, everything will fall apart. It is a false association between happiness and vulnerability. When we hear stories of hardship, they usually begin like this: “Everything was great… until.” This leads us to unconsciously believe that once everything seems as though its going well, that’s when we’re hit with the worst. First of all, those stories are a product of projection: everything seemed perfect in retrospect, when the given challenge didn’t exist. On top of that, most people don’t have a “fall from grace,” they get their lives on…
