How much do you trust your perceptions?
The way of interpreting the events varies from person to person. For example, a student who gets a low grade on the exam may say, "I'm always a failure anyway," while the other might say, "This exam was difficult." We also encounter some cognitive distortions within this difference in interpretation. Cognitive distortion is the state of understanding facts differently than they actually are. The first step we need to take to expand our perspective and improve our quality of life is to recognize cognitive distortions. So what are these cognitive distortions?
Mind Reading: We cannot read anyone's mind, but we often make assumptions about what goes through people's minds. For example, if the person we are chatting with yawns because he did not sleep well the night before and we interpret this as 'he was bored with me, I made him sleepy', we will be reading minds.
All-or-nothing thinking : It can be very tiring to see life as black or white, leaving no room for grey. Life actually consists of grays, there is no only good or only bad. For example, the article I write will not be the best, so I shouldn't write it at all. All-or-nothing thinking leads us to exhausting perfectionism.
Ignoring the Positive (Magnification-Minimizing): We may tend to magnify our failures while belittling our successes. For example, a student belittles his/her success by saying 'it was easy' for the exam in which he received a high grade.
Arbitrary Inference: It is when a person makes some assumptions despite not having enough evidence. For example, saying 'women only like smart men', 'it rained on the day we were going to go on a picnic, we are unlucky'.
Selective Abstraction: Instead of evaluating a situation as a whole, focusing on just one detail and focusing on that detail. Commenting is selective abstraction. For example, a person misses the bus on a day when everything is going well and evaluates the whole day as 'bad' by focusing only on missing the bus.
Overgeneralization:This is when a person generalizes a situation he encounters to his entire life. For example, a person who is cheated on by his/her lover will be cheated on in all future relationships.
Personalization: It is when a person appropriates an event that has little or nothing to do with him/her. For example, the mother feels guilty in the face of her child who is not successful in classes and thinks that she is a failed mother.
Catastrophizing:Imagining the outcome of a situation to be worse than what actually happened or will happen. For example, a young person going to a job interview thinks that if the result of the interview is negative, he will not be able to get a job somewhere else and says 'If I cannot get a job, my life will be over'. ' and it is not easy to live in accordance with these beliefs because life may not always follow these rules. When these rules are not followed, the person feels uneasy and even sees this as a disaster. For example, 'I should always be the best', 'I should be loved by everyone', 'I should not show my weaknesses to anyone'.
To improve your quality of life..
Usually, several of these cognitive errors occur together. As a first step, after realizing which of these you use intensively, it would be appropriate to get professional support to replace these dysfunctional thoughts with functional ones.
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