You're probably aware that when we experience a threat or danger, our body goes into a state of "fight, flight or freeze (or fawn)". You might be less aware about how these states change the way we think. All these survival states come with a narrowing of focus onto danger. This makes it harder for us to think creatively and see out of the box solutions or possibilities. Facing a threat activates thinking tendencies or styles that if we get locked into them long-term can lead us down the pathway of depression, anxiety or chronic stress. In this blog post I'm going to review three of the most common unhelpful thinking styles that can negatively impact our mental health.
Black and White Thinking
Black and white thinking is when we see things as existing only in a binary. It's either this or it's that. This type of thinking pushes everything down to being one of two extremes. For example we
are either perfect or a failure, good or bad, the world is just or unjust, other people are either kind or horrible. This is problematic because the world isn't black and white. Most things exist on a continuum and in the grey. For example most people have flaws and imperfections, that is what makes us human and we are still worthy of respect and kindness despite these failings.
Focusing on the Negatives
This is a bias towards noticing and focusing on things that are threatening to us in some way, usually with a negative tone and meaning. This often comes with ignoring, not noticing or even discounting the positives. When we do this our view of things is off balanced and slanted negatively.
Catastrophising
Catastrophising is "blowing things out of proportion" or making things worse and into bigger problems than they actually are. An example could be thinking that if you are late for work one day that you are going to lose your job or because your partner forgot your anniversary that they don't love you anymore. Similarly to focusing on the negatives this thinking style makes life and it's challenges look a lot worse and problematic than they actually are.
The reason we have developed these thinking styles is because they help us to make fast decisions that in a survival situation helps save our lives. By jumping to conclusions and seeing the extreme version of things we can quickly form conclusions without wasting thinking time or brain power. In a survival situation, this is exactly what we want to be able to do. When it comes to our daily lives and decisions though these thinking styles are usually not accurate or helpful. Unfortunately the world we live in today has many things that can feel like a threat to our animal brains. Whether it's bills, work stress or too much responsibility with raising children or juggling other responsibilities, if we get caught in these types of thinking styles we can develop a negative viewpoint of our lives and the world leading to anxiety or depression.
It's important to remember that these thinking styles are not actually accurate, they are interpretations of a situation that have pushed things to extremes (black and white thinking), focused on certain things (the negatives) and exaggerated problems (catastrophising). If we want to see the world more accurately here are four steps we want to practice:
1. Notice - we want to learn to notice when we are using an unhelpful thinking style.
2. Look at the facts - ask ourselves what is the evidence for this conclusion and what is the evidence against this conclusion?
3. Helpful - ask ourselves is it helpful to think like this?
4. Choose - choose to let go of the unhelpful thinking styles and conclusions and embrace the more logical conclusion that the evidence is supporting.
Sometimes we can go through all these steps and know logically that something probably isn't true but still feel like it's true. This usually suggests that the belief or assumptions being activated may be tied to a core belief that we learnt as a child or potentially we experienced a trauma that was so distressing that it changed the way we view ourselves or the world. When this is the case there are a few techniques we can use and I like to integrate techniques from Schema Therapy and EMDR. You can learn more about schema therapy from a previous blog post I wrote here.
If you'd like to learn more about how our brain has developed two different styles of thinking, one fast and the other slow, you can also check out this book based on Nobel prize winning research by the author and his colleague Amos Tversky: 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' by Daniel Kahneman.
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