Thinking that causes depression

10 Ways of thinking that causes Depression / Anxiety

What we think directly relates to how we feel, and when we are felling bad the feeling can feed back into more negative thinking. Ans so one spirals downwards into the pit. A saying goes: “Stinky thinking causes stinky feelings”.

“We can only attend to what we are aware of” is a useful motto. First thing is to bring our thinking and the name of the emotion into our awareness. What are you thinking and feeling?  Next is the challenge the stinky thinking. Is it a rational thought coming balanced truth? Or is it a worn out, habitualised way of thinking that we have picked up in the past, and for poor reasons held onto, and then replay over and over when we are feeling down?

Time to let stinky thinking go and start healthy, balanced thinking?

Catch yourself out by identifying when you are doing one of these ways of thinking, and then change this thinking to something much more reasonable. All of these 10 ways of thinking are untrue, and have lost balance, therefore the way to correct this is to bring truth and balance into your thinking.

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. - Healthy thinking is being able to balance, and not jump to too pessimistic or optimistic view.

2.  Over-generalisation. 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 the drop of ink that discolours the entire glass of water.

4.  Disqualifying the positive. You reject positive experiences by insisting they 'don't count' for some reason or other. 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 the conclusion.

6.  Magnification or minimisation. You exaggerate the importance of things (such as our own failure or someone else's achievements), 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 'Should's' and 'Shouldn'ts', as if you have to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. 'Must's' and 'Ought's' are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt.

9.  Labelling and miss-labelling. An extreme form of over-generalisation. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself-'I'm a loser.' When someone else's behaviour rubs you up the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him - 'He's a louse.' Labelling-labelling involves describing an event with language that is highly coloured and emotionally loaded.

10.  Personalisation. You see yourself as the cause of some negative, external event which, in fact, you are not primarily responsible for.

Credit David Burns