10 Forms of Twisted Thinking That Will Drain Your Energy

Ever feel exhausted after a conversation with someone? Check the list to see if you are having twisted thinking. I think I’ve caught myself doing several of them…at one time or another.

Read more: 10 Forms of Twisted Thinking That Will Drain Your Energy
  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.
    “Everything bad always happens to me!”
  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 (my college diploma was a stroke of luck…really it was).
  5. Jumping to conclusions: You conclude things are bad without any definite evidence. These include mind-reading (assuming that people are reacting negatively to you ) and fortune-telling (predicting 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 (every other word for me): 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 “I’m 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.

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