What are Cognitive Distortions – And What You Need to Know About Them!

A Cognitive Distortion is where we focus on particular aspects of an experience (often the ‘negative’ ones) and ignore or discount other aspects – thereby “distorting” our view of the world.

People are usually unaware of how they distort their experience with the words they use. Cognitive Distortions not only limit our choices, but can lead to unnecessary suffering – and sometimes even make a situation worse when we act on incorrect assumptions.

As a coach, Cognitive Distortions are a great opportunity to raise our client’s awareness and challenge their limiting thought processes, allowing us to dig into the limiting beliefs people have about themselves, others and the world.

Why do we “distort” our experience? Well, it’s often (but not always) unconscious. When we use words to attempt to convey the richness of our experience and thoughts, information gets “lost in translation”. A limited range of words can only attempt to describe the infinite possibilities of our experience. There are also two other major ways we lose the richness of our experience - ”Generalising” and “Deleting” information – which we will talk about separately.

So, below is a brief list of the 10 Most Common Cognitive Distortions:

1. All or Nothing Thinking - also known as black or white thinking.
2. Overgeneralization - viewing a single negative experience as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
3. Minimising or Magnifying (also Catastrophizing) - Playing up or playing down one particular aspect of an experience to our own detriment.
4. Using “Shoulds”, “Musts”, “Ought tos” - Criticizing ourselves or others and then feeling guilt (or anger/frustration)
5. Labelling (or Mislabelling) - Turning a single experience into a sweeping judgement, “He’s a jerk”, “I’m a failure”
6. Jumping to conclusions - Making assumptions with little evidence to back it up.
   1) Mind-Reading - making assumptions about what others are thinking
   2) Fortune Telling - making assumptions about what the future holds
7. Discounting the positive - Anyone could have done it, or it doesn’t count…
8. Blame and Personalization - Overblaming ourselves, or blaming others and denying our role in a situation
9. Emotional Reasoning - I feel something, so it must be true
10. Mental Filter - Dwelling on one small thing and allowing that to spoil our experience

Check out our Free Coaching Tools here for a handy reference list of the 10 Most Common Cognitive Distortions - to use in session or give out to clients. This tool comes complete with helpful descriptions and examples of how they are used!

To learn a Simple 3-step Framework to Challenge a Client around a Cognitive Distortion, you may like this article here.

Watch out for: Cognitive Distortions are not just ‘negative’ or limiting. Sometimes a cognitive distortion can lead to great creativity and new ideas…

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