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.

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.