Unhelpful Thinking

 Unhelpful Thinking 

I am a true believer in learning and expanding your knowledge. From this you can begin to solve problems, understand yourself and the world around you. Learning the details of my disorder, the harm that it was doing to me and those around me helped in overcoming my eating disorder and restoring balance within my thoughts and lifestyle in general. But one of the greatest things I learnt while in hospital last year was how unhelpful thinking styles I'd developed, and begun to rely on, were negatively impacting my emotions leading to the depression and anxiety that had become such a part of who I was. Snowballing, these lead to unhealthy behaviours, food rules and compulsive exercise regimes within the eating disorder that drove me to destruction.  

Learning about these I was able to identify and recognise them within myself - the first step in conquering them and adopting a more positive and healthier mindset. 

I acknowledge that some of these are common-place. And I want to stress that they are not symptoms or identifiers of mental illnesses. They are not always harmful. But if they are present in abundance, become habitual and exist in combination with other distorted thinking patterns then, as with myself, they may be warning signs of a fragile, anxious and harmful mind. 

Below are ten of the unhelpful thinking styles that I was taught, each with a brief description of what they entail.

Mental Filter - perceived as a sort of 'tunnel vision' this invariably relates to focus purely on negative aspects of a situation. The whole picture becomes coloured by one singular negative detail, overwhelming all other details. Thinking about school, college, uni or work when one poor essay, one dodgy presentation or one little mistake makes you feel as though you are incapable, despite tens of excellent, really well received work

Jumping to Conclusions - synonymous of mind reading and predictive thinking this refers to assumptions that we know what others are thinking, what they may do or how they may react. Automatically assuming that people don't like you, that they will respond negatively and criticise anything that you do.

Personalisation - blaming yourself for everything that goes wrong or could possibly go wrong, even when you may only be partly responsible or not responsible at all. Taking all the credit, thinking it was because of you that things didn't end well, when in reality it was out of your control and could not be influenced. 

Catastrophising - blowing things out of proportion, making it into a much bigger deal than it is. 'Making a mountain out of a mole hill' or viewing the situation in the worst light possible ie as terrible, awful, dreadful and horrible - even though the reality is that the problem itself is quite small, irrelevant to those around you or really not bad at all. 

Black and White Thinking - seeing everything as one extreme or the other with no in-between. Things are either right or wrong, good or bad, when in reality there are multiple shades of grey. Believing you can either have things or not rather than allowing yourself the freedom to choose when you enjoy those things. 

Shoulding and Musting - saying 'I should' or 'I must'. Putting unreasonable pressure and demands on yourself. While often acceptable and helpful - they can also create unrealistic expectations, increase boundaries of acceptability and over-inflate the standards that people measure themselves while really unnecessary. 

Overgeneralisation - taking one instance and imposing it on to all other situations ie from the past to the present. 'You always...', 'Everyone...' or 'I never...' transferring this into everything that surrounds us. 

Labelling - categorising people, actions and things by making global statements based on specific situations. Always referring back to this label even if there are multiple examples that are inconsistent with the label given ie saying that you don't like something or somewhere due to one negative experience. 

Emotional Reasoning - Basing your opinions and attitudes towards yourself and others on you mood at the time - for example thinking negatively about yourself or those around you because you are feeling lonely or depressed. Quite common and not always bad, however, this can form a part of a vicious cycle gradually worsening opinions of yourself and your mood. 

Magnification and Minimisation - highlighting and magnifying the positive attributes of other people and minimise your own positive attributes even if they are the same or viewed by others the same way. It's quite easy to fall into this trap, to put others on a pedestal while lessening the value and worth of your own achievements. 

Knowing about these unhelpful thinking patterns, can highlight just how destructive they can be. But it is itself a helpful way to combat and challenge them. Whether it by putting things into perspective, taking a wider view or narrowing down your own habits and tendencies.