Automatic Negative Thoughts

These are from a list Allison received in one of her counseling classes. They are common negative thoughts that all of us experience at different times that keep us from accomplishing what we are truly capable of. This list ultimately comes from Dr. David Burns, M.D. in his book "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy." Apparently this book is considered kind of a pop-psychology book in the field, but also has some good points such as the ones he makes below.

1) All-Or-Nothing Thinking: You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.

2) Overgeneralization: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.

3) Mental Filter: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like a drop of ink that discolors the entire beaker of water.

4) Disqualifying the Positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting that they "don't count" for some reason or another. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.

5) Jumping to Conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.

6) Magnification (catastrophizing) or Minimization: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as you goof-up or someone else's achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other person's imperfections). This is also called the "binocular trick."

7) Emotional Reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: "I feel it, therefore it must be true."

8) Should Statements: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn'ts, as if you had to be punished before you could be expected to do anything. "Musts" and "oughts" are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.

9) Labeling and Mislabeling: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: I'm a loser." When someone else's behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him or her: "He's a louse." Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.

10) Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.

Any of these sound familiar? I know they do for me. Hope these can offer some insight into thinking about your thinking and how your thinking might be keeping you from doing what you really want to be doing with your life. Take care, Jeff