10 Common Mistakes in Thinking

10 common mistakes in thinking:

1. All-or-Nothing Thinking
You see things as black or white, never grey, e.g. if your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.

2. Overgeneralisation
You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern, e.g. “I messed up”, “I never get anything right”.

3. Mental Filter
You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your view of reality becomes darkened, like a drop of ink that discolours an 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 continue to see everything as negative even when your  everyday experiences contradict this.

5. Jumping to Conclusions
You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your interpretation. Eg. Mind reading, the fortune telling.

6. Magnification or Minimisation
You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your error or someone else’s 
success), or you incorrectly shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other person’s imperfections).

7. Emotional Reasoning
You believe that your negative emotions reflect the way that things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true”.

8. “Should” "Must" Statements
You try to motivate yourself with “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. The emotional consequence are feelings of guilt, or being inadequate or wrong. When you tell others they “should” do something, you feel anger, frustration and resentment.

9. Labelling and Mislabelling
This is an extreme form of overgeneralisation. Instead of describing your error, you 
attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser” instead of “I didn’t do that well”. When someone else’s behaviour annoys you, you judge him/her as a “loser”. Mislabelling is describing an event with harsh, emotional or judging statements.

10. Personalisation
You blame yourself for being the cause of some negative event for which you were not responsible. So, for example, if something goes wrong and affects others negatively, you take on the blame for it and feel bad.