Policing Your Negative Thoughts

Free AI web copilot to create summaries, insights and extended knowledge, download it at here

1943

Abstract

, stopping me from going too far down the road of self-pity or self-blaming. It breaks down as follows:P is for Personalization, where you think that everything that happens is because of what you have or haven’t done. For example, when someone snaps at you, you may think that you’ve offended them and start to agonize over it, when in reality they may have just received some bad news and not be thinking much about you at all. Or for a child it might be that your parents have an argument or split up and you blame yourself when there’s actually nothing you could have done to change things.O is for Overgeneralization, such as when I screw something up and immediately tell myself that I am always screwing up or never do anything right. However bad you feel about something, you can always make it even worse by seeing it as confirmation of a permanent and unchangeable character defect.L is for Labeling, which happens when you call yourself or someone else a jerk or a failure for some thing they have done and don’t admit that they could ever act in any other way. It closes the door to dialogue (with yourself or others) if you jump directly from an action you don’t like to an exclusive label derived from that action.I stands for “I should” or “They should” meaning that you have rigid mental rules about how you or other people have to behave. When you or they don’t follow the rules, then you feel stress. How many times have you said to yourself “I should have known that”? And how helpful has that question been on any of those occasions? We drag around with us the mental rulebook used on us by our parents, or even make new rules up on the spot (“They shouldn’t be allowed out like that”) to beat ourselves up or give ourselves the high moral ground.C stands for Conclusion-jumping. This can either involve mind-reading, such as saying “He d

Options

idn’t say hello because he thinks he’s better than me”, or it can be crystal-ball gazing, such as when you think “I haven’t got a girlfriend now and I never will”. Nothing can come of this mental self-trickery except to make a bad situation feel worse.E is for Emotional reasoning, where you think that because you feel a certain way, then there must be some underlying truth — if I feel guilty, then I must have done something wrong, if I feel sad, I must be clinically depressed.M is for Maximising problems, making mountains out of molehills, which makes you despair and retreat rather than working calmly towards a solution.A is for All-or-nothing thinking, believing that anything less than everything you want will be disastrous. An example might be “If I can’t get straight As in my exams, it isn’t worth bothering at all”.N is for negative filtering, where you hold on to evidence that reinforces your negative view of yourself or others while disqualifying positive indicators — “Sure she says I’m great, but she’s my mom”.There is a lot of overlap between them but they are all ways in which we sometimes beat ourselves up unnecessarily or make situations seem bleaker than they are. Once you recognize the tricks your brain is pulling you can take a step back and get things more into perspective.The whole purpose is to identify (in order to challenge) every variety of emotional overreaction you may encounter. If you need to challenge a tendency to be hard on yourself then it’s an anti-depressive treatment. If your tendency is to blame others for everything, then it’s more of an anger management technique. Whichever applies to you, self-knowledge is the key to self-improvement.<h1 id="2e07">References</h1>Largely based on the book Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, by David D Burns</article></body>

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Made Memorable

One of the main tenets of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is that we do not react directly to external events, but rather to our beliefs about those events. Where our beliefs are distorted by exaggeration or simplification, we may overreact to those external stimuli.

An example — a co-worker bumps into us making us spill our tea, and we immediately become enraged thinking “he’s always got his head in the clouds, he’s such a klutz, he should be more careful”. This contains at least three cognitive distortions, namely a generalization, the application of a label and invention of a spurious unwritten rule.

But how can we spot the warning flags and challenge distorted beliefs before they trigger an overreaction?

When I was diagnosed with a “mood disorder” some years ago, I found CBT to be the most effective way to make sense of what was happening to me, and it supplied a toolkit which I could use to take back control.

My particular problem was approval addiction, where I was affected to an unhealthy degree by other people’s opinion of me. But the CBT toolkit that I learned is equally effective in understanding aggressive or depressive tendencies.

One of the most helpful steps I took during this period was to encapsulate the various ways in which I was overreacting into the mnemonic POLICEMAN, which I aimed to use like a traffic cop, stopping me from going too far down the road of self-pity or self-blaming. It breaks down as follows:

P is for Personalization, where you think that everything that happens is because of what you have or haven’t done. For example, when someone snaps at you, you may think that you’ve offended them and start to agonize over it, when in reality they may have just received some bad news and not be thinking much about you at all. Or for a child it might be that your parents have an argument or split up and you blame yourself when there’s actually nothing you could have done to change things.

O is for Overgeneralization, such as when I screw something up and immediately tell myself that I am always screwing up or never do anything right. However bad you feel about something, you can always make it even worse by seeing it as confirmation of a permanent and unchangeable character defect.

L is for Labeling, which happens when you call yourself or someone else a jerk or a failure for some thing they have done and don’t admit that they could ever act in any other way. It closes the door to dialogue (with yourself or others) if you jump directly from an action you don’t like to an exclusive label derived from that action.

I stands for “I should” or “They should” meaning that you have rigid mental rules about how you or other people have to behave. When you or they don’t follow the rules, then you feel stress. How many times have you said to yourself “I should have known that”? And how helpful has that question been on any of those occasions? We drag around with us the mental rulebook used on us by our parents, or even make new rules up on the spot (“They shouldn’t be allowed out like that”) to beat ourselves up or give ourselves the high moral ground.

C stands for Conclusion-jumping. This can either involve mind-reading, such as saying “He didn’t say hello because he thinks he’s better than me”, or it can be crystal-ball gazing, such as when you think “I haven’t got a girlfriend now and I never will”. Nothing can come of this mental self-trickery except to make a bad situation feel worse.

E is for Emotional reasoning, where you think that because you feel a certain way, then there must be some underlying truth — if I feel guilty, then I must have done something wrong, if I feel sad, I must be clinically depressed.

M is for Maximising problems, making mountains out of molehills, which makes you despair and retreat rather than working calmly towards a solution.

A is for All-or-nothing thinking, believing that anything less than everything you want will be disastrous. An example might be “If I can’t get straight As in my exams, it isn’t worth bothering at all”.

N is for negative filtering, where you hold on to evidence that reinforces your negative view of yourself or others while disqualifying positive indicators — “Sure she says I’m great, but she’s my mom”.

There is a lot of overlap between them but they are all ways in which we sometimes beat ourselves up unnecessarily or make situations seem bleaker than they are. Once you recognize the tricks your brain is pulling you can take a step back and get things more into perspective.

The whole purpose is to identify (in order to challenge) every variety of emotional overreaction you may encounter. If you need to challenge a tendency to be hard on yourself then it’s an anti-depressive treatment. If your tendency is to blame others for everything, then it’s more of an anger management technique. Whichever applies to you, self-knowledge is the key to self-improvement.