In a job interview, you present yourself with professionalism, answer all questions concisely, and have the qualifications to get the job. But walking out of the room, you still feel like you didn’t do well.
Maybe you feel like the hiring manager didn’t like you, or you can’t stop thinking about one small misstep. This knee-jerk reaction might seem like a fleeting thought, but it's part of a larger pattern that can profoundly affect your emotional health: cognitive distortions.
These mental biases can make you rethink situations and focus on the negative, clouding your judgment and contributing to low self-esteem. Mapping distortions can help you navigate through them and experience situations as they are — not how your negative self-talk tells you to perceive them.
What are cognitive distortions?
The definition of cognitive distortion is your brain’s inaccurate perception of reality. This happens when biases and irrational thought patterns influence your experiences, usually negatively. This might look like always assuming the worst will happen or that you only have two potential solutions to a problem.
In the 1960s, American psychiatrist Aaron Beck named these thought patterns and shared how they can heavily influence your emotional state and contribute to mental health challenges. Psychiatrist and author David D. Burns later popularized and expanded the concept in his book, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, when he explained how recognizing cognitive distortion leads to more authentic, positive information processing.
10 types of cognitive distortions
Cognitive distortions can range from black-and-white thinking, which is viewing situations in extremes, to mental filtering, which limits your focus to the negative by filtering out positives. Since distortions can be quite broad, they’re often hard to spot — especially if you’ve been using this kind of thinking for a long time without realizing it.
But thwarting cognitive distortions can have far-reaching positive impacts on your mental health. Research from Europe’s Journal of Psychology shows that distorted thinking indicates a decrease in adaptive humor styles, which can make it harder to cope with stress. The same research found that the impacts could lead to increased depressive symptoms.
Learning more about distortions is the first step to addressing them. Here’s a more detailed list of cognitive distortions, according to research from both Beck and Burns:
1. Black-and-white thinking
When you view the world in absolutes with no gray area, you're experiencing black-and-white thinking. This type of all-or-nothing thinking eliminates the rich spectrum of human experience, reducing complex outcomes and behaviors to simple categories like “good” or “bad.” It's a mental shortcut that strips nuance away from your understanding of events, leading to skewed self-esteem and well-being.
2. Overgeneralization
Overgeneralization occurs when you take one negative event or quality and generalize it to your entire life. Failing at a specific task might lead you to believe you're incapable in all areas of life, even when you have many strong hard and soft skills. This thinking style not only undermines self-esteem but also creates a negative filter through which you view life's challenges, assuming that you’ll fail instead of using your skills to succeed.
3. Labeling
An extension of overgeneralization, labeling involves attaching a broad, often negative, label to yourself or others based on limited information. When you label, you reduce yourself or others to a single, often unflattering trait, which can be damaging to self-esteem and relationships. This could be something like “This person canceled on me once, so they’re flaky,” or “I made a mistake, so I’m a failure.”
4. Mental filtering
Mental filtering is when you exclude all positive events and only focus on the negative. It's like having tunnel vision for all that goes wrong, and it can dramatically distort your sense of reality to favor the negative aspects of your life. This cognitive distortion can also perpetuate a poor self-image, learned helplessness, and a pessimistic view of the world.
5. Disqualifying the positive
Even when positive events occur, cognitive distortion might find ways to dismiss them. This tendency to discount the good in your life can manifest as attributing success to luck rather than skill and falling victim to imposter syndrome. Like mental filtering, disqualifying the positive perpetuates a pessimistic view of the world by misrepresenting the good.
6. Jumping to conclusions
As the name suggests, this distortion involves drawing conclusions with little to no supporting evidence. This can lead to erroneous beliefs about future events or others’ thoughts. It manifests in two ways: mind-reading, where you think you know how others will react or feel before an event occurs, and fortune-telling, where you predict negative outcomes without basis. One way this can manifest is through the spotlight effect, which can make you feel like everyone’s watching and judging you.
7. Magnification and minimization
With this distortion, you might blow things out of proportion (magnification) or inappropriately shrink something to make it seem less important (minimization). This can affect how you perceive and react to your own achievements or the difficulties you face, often skewing your perspective in a way that's detrimental to a balanced self-view.
8. Emotional reasoning
This distortion leads you to believe that your emotional response dictates the truth of a situation — if you feel something strongly, it must be true. But your emotions aren’t always in line with objective reality, and emotional reasoning can lead to irrational thoughts and behaviors. It can cloud judgment and lead to decisions that don’t align with your long-term well-being.
9. "Should" statements
This cognitive distortion involves rigid self-directives that often contain the word “should,” like “I should be a manager by the time I’m 30,” or “I should’ve known better.” Rather than embracing a spectrum of possibilities, “should” statements set up an uncompromising standard, and your self-esteem can take a hit if you don’t meet them. The problem is that these statements often reflect unrealistic demands and pressures, leading to frustration and disappointment when life doesn’t align.
10. Personalization and blaming
These cognitive distortions misassign responsibility for events, whether by internalizing blame without merit (personalization) or attributing it entirely to others (blaming). Personalization is about seeing yourself as the sole cause of external issues, while blaming is the inverse, assigning responsibility to outside forces or people for personal challenges. This kind of thinking is unproductive and could lead to unnecessary conflict.
What causes cognitive distortions? 4 factors
Cognitive distortions are automatic thoughts, and they usually stem from previous experiences, biases, or stressors. Recognizing where yours could be coming from can help you get to the root of your negative thinking and deconstruct your assumptions.
Here are four factors that could lead to cognitive distortion:
1. Biases and heuristics
Your brain loves a shortcut. It uses cognitive biases and heuristics to make quick judgments. Although this might save you mental energy, these shortcuts prevent you from looking at the bigger picture and seeing a situation for what it is.
For a work project that’s running late, cognitive distortion might lead you to overestimate negative outcomes based on a past project and assume that everything will go wrong. But if you look at the whole situation, you might find that a few missed deadlines aren’t a big deal, and your team can easily get back on track.
2. Upbringing and life experiences
The seeds of cognitive distortions frequently find their roots early in life. As a child, the behaviors you observe and the feedback you receive can shape your thought patterns and lead into adulthood.
Growing up, you might have made a mistake and been told that it affected your worth, leading to overgeneralization and labeling. That practice may have led into your adult life, causing you to jump to conclusions and see yourself as a failure when small things go wrong.
3. Mood and stress
It’s no secret that stress or a bad mood can change your thinking. When you’re in a high-stress situation, emotional reasoning can take the forefront, telling you that if you feel something it must be true. Stress can also narrow your focus and make you focus on the negative. These distortions can prevent you from solving problems effectively or approaching conflict with respect.
4. Information processing styles
The very style in which you process information can predispose you to cognitive distortions. If you’re inclined toward black-and-white thinking, you might categorize everything as one extreme or another, missing the subtle nuances of a situation. You could also subscribe to many “should” statements in your life and naturally put yourself down when you don’t meet your own standards.
2 cognitive distortion examples
Cognitive distortions are pervasive in everyday thinking, and they can significantly influence your mental health and perception of reality. You might not even realize you’re doing it, but by becoming aware of these distortions, you can begin to challenge and reframe them for a more resilient mindset.
To help you understand what distortions look like in real life, here are two examples:
1. Mental filtering
You give a presentation at work, and in the moment, you thought it went really well. Afterward, your boss congratulates you and praises your effort, but they point out a mistake you made in one of your slides. That feedback leads you to assume your boss was lying about the positive aspects of your presentation to make you feel better. You filter out the praise you received in favor of the negative.
2. Labeling
A friend cancels your plans last minute because of a family emergency. Later, they confess that they lied. They were just having a bad day and didn’t have the energy to hang out, and they didn’t want you to feel bad. Instead of recognizing the reasoning behind their actions, you label them a liar, limiting your impression of them and weakening your relationship.
How to challenge cognitive distortions: 7 tips
Challenging cognitive distortions can help you maintain your self-esteem, navigate emotional situations, and approach your interpersonal relationships with integrity. With these seven strategies, you can start transforming your negative thoughts into constructive actions:
1. Identify and label
When a negative thought arises, ask yourself, “What type of cognitive distortion am I facing?” Whether it's overgeneralization or magnification, labeling the distortion puts you in control and opens opportunities for improvement. It's the first step toward cognitive restructuring, allowing you to see the biases in your thinking and find ways to thwart it.
2. Examine the evidence
Challenge your negative thoughts by examining the evidence. If you find yourself in the trap of mind-reading, ask yourself, “What evidence do I have that others are thinking this about me?” This can dispel irrational thoughts and show you the truth behind situations.
3. Try cognitive restructuring
Reframe the negative distortion in a way that's both positive and realistic. If you’re minimizing the positive, consciously amplify it instead. This reframing isn't about seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. It’s about viewing situations in a balanced way, seeing them as a neutral party would instead of catering to your biases.
4. Test your assumptions
If you’re prone to fortune-telling and assuming the worst, set up an experiment to test the validity of your predictions. Behavioral experiments can provide concrete experiences that either support or refute your core beliefs. In most cases, you’ll find that your negative assumptions are partially or fully incorrect.
5. Practice mindfulness
Mindfulness brings your focus to the truth of the present, reducing the impact of distortions. It's about observing your thoughts and feelings without judgment, preventing you from falling into negative thinking patterns and helping you develop a more balanced perspective.
6. Pursue therapy
Reducing the impacts of cognitive distortions is a key goal of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), an approach that seeks to mitigate negative thinking. This process aims to identify and challenge distortions, improving mental health and fostering more adaptive thought patterns. If you’re experiencing thoughts that significantly affect your well-being, speaking to a mental health professional who specializes in CBT could help you.
7. Work with a coach
If you need support and want to change your mindset, working with a coach is also a good choice. They’ll help you work through challenging situations, break down your assumptions, and set goals for the future, helping you become more open-minded and aware of your biases. Instead of ruminating, you’ll have action-based conversations that lead to tangible growth.
Rewiring your thoughts
Cognitive distortions can often lead you astray from the reality of situations, painting them as negative. But CBT, mindfulness, and listening to yourself and others can act as compasses to guide you back to reality.
By understanding and challenging your distorted thoughts, you can improve your mental fitness and foster more productive thinking. Instead of assuming the worst, you’ll see situations as they really are and start making action plans to improve them. The power to reshape your thought patterns lies within you — one thought at a time.
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