DAY 7 OF 10: FEELING GOOD AND COGNITIVE DISTORTIONS
This is amazing. I am on my 7th day of my 10-day writing challenge. So far, I am encountering many challenges throughout this course. Some of them are lack of motivation, imbalanced lifestyle, sickness et cetera. But, it doesn't just end there, in fact, I am 70% on my way to finishing this 10-day writing challenge.
For this blog, I would attempt to discuss mental or cognitive distortions in my own words. Cognitive distortions was popularized by the book, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David D. Burns. According to Psychology Today, cognitive distortions are exactly what the name implies: distortions in our cognition. Put another way, cognitive distortions are biased perspectives we take on ourselves and the world around us. They are irrational thoughts and beliefs that we unknowingly reinforce over time.
Learning what cognitive distortions are is part of the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or CBT which is used by many health professionals to treat depression and anxiety disorders. Once learned by individuals, it is prerogative for someone to explore the avenues of these distortions. Although there are about 10 or 11 of them, their theme appears to be the same - negative thinking. Here are a few of them that i would like to share:
All-or-Nothing Thinking / Polarized Thinking
This is also known as black and white thinking. For someone who has depression, they may think either for example, that life is about having everything they want in life or they feel hopeless. They can also feel either extremely happy or heavily depressed.
Overgeneralization
This is a biased thinking looking at negative events and summarizing it up to an overgeneralized negative event. For someone, they might highlight events like a loss of friend, stress at work, financial problems, et cetera as the description of life as general. This an attitude of disqualifying the positive. This is also similar with magnification where people magnify events and become over-generalized
Emotional Reasoning
Emotions are very powerful energy that people feel. Emotional reasoning happen when someone is seeking justice in a situation. Sometimes, when someone feels unwell, his or her decisions becomes unreasonable but when you feel good, decisions are more reasonable.
Thank you for reading my blog, here's a song you can listen to if you wanna start a good day. :)