Cognitive distortion facts for kids

"Thinking errors" redirects here. For faulty reasoning, see Fallacy.

A thinking trap (also called a cognitive distortion) is a way of thinking that makes you see things in an exaggerated or unhelpful way. These tricky thoughts can sometimes lead to feeling sad or worried, like with depression or anxiety.

Imagine your brain has a special filter. Sometimes, this filter can get a bit stuck, making everything look negative. This idea comes from a smart person named Aaron Beck. He said that when we have a negative way of looking at the world, it can make us feel bad. These negative thoughts can make our negative feelings even stronger. When things are tough, these distorted thoughts can make us feel like the whole world is against us, leading to sad or anxious feelings. Beck believed that how we understand and interpret what happens to us greatly affects whether we become depressed or have long-lasting sad feelings.

Learning to spot and change these thinking traps is a big part of a helpful type of therapy called cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

What are Thinking Traps?

The word "cognitive" means anything related to thinking or knowing. "Distortion" means twisting or changing something from its true shape. So, a "cognitive distortion" is like a "twisted thought" or a "thinking trap."

How We Learned About Thinking Traps

In 1957, an American psychologist named Albert Ellis came up with a way to understand how our beliefs affect our feelings. He called it the ABC Technique.

A stands for the activating event (what happened).
B stands for the beliefs (your thoughts about what happened).
C stands for the consequences (how you feel and act).

Ellis showed that it's not just what happens to us that makes us feel a certain way, but how we think about it. He helped people "reframe" their experiences, meaning they learned to see things in a more helpful way.

Later, another smart person, Aaron T. Beck, started noticing these automatic, unhelpful thoughts in his patients. He realized that many people had quick, negative thoughts about themselves, even if they didn't say them out loud. These thoughts were often unfair and wrong.

Beck believed that these negative ways of thinking could make people focus on their flaws, make small problems seem huge, and see harmless comments as mean. This could make them feel like giving up or not wanting to take care of themselves. These twisted thoughts feel very real because they become automatic, like a habit, and don't give us time to think them through. This cycle is also known as Beck's cognitive triad, which means a person's negative thoughts about themselves, their future, and the world around them.

In 1972, Aaron Beck wrote a book called Depression: Causes and Treatment. He wasn't happy with how depression was usually treated back then, because there wasn't much proof that it worked. Beck's book offered a new way to understand depression, its causes, and how to treat it. He described how people with depression often had low self-worth, expected bad things to happen, blamed themselves, and had trouble making decisions.

Beck's student, David D. Burns, continued this work. His book, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, made Beck's ideas about thinking traps very popular. Burns's book helped millions of people understand and change their negative thoughts. Later, The Feeling Good Handbook was published, which listed ten specific thinking traps.

Common Thinking Traps

Examples of some common thinking traps seen in people who feel sad or worried. People can learn how to spot and change these traps in therapy.

There are many types of thinking traps. Here are some of the most common ones:

All-or-Nothing Thinking

This trap is also called "black-and-white thinking." When you think this way, you see things in extremes. Everything is either perfect or a total disaster. There's no middle ground.

Example: A girl is trying to eat healthier. She eats one small piece of cake. She thinks, "I'm a complete failure! My diet is ruined!" Because she thinks this way, she might then eat the whole cake, feeling even worse.

To fight this trap, try to see the world in "shades of gray." Even if you make a small mistake, you can still recognize your overall effort.

Jumping to Conclusions

This trap means you decide something is true, usually something negative, with very little or no proof.

Mind Reading

This is when you think you know what someone else is thinking, usually something bad, without actually asking them.

Example: A student thinks that the people reading their paper have already decided it's bad, so writing it feels pointless.
Example: Kevin sits alone at lunch and assumes everyone thinks he's a loser. This might make him not try to talk to anyone.

Fortune-Telling

This is when you predict that something bad will happen in the future, even if there's no real reason to believe it.

Example: A person feeling sad tells themselves, "I'll never feel better; I'll be sad my whole life."

Labeling Others

This is when you give someone a negative label based on one action or a small piece of information, instead of seeing them as a whole person.

Example: Your friend takes a long time to text you back. You think, "They must be mad at me," instead of thinking they might just be busy.

Emotional Reasoning

This trap means you believe something is true just because you feel it strongly. Your feelings become facts.

Example: "I feel stupid, so I must be stupid."
Example: Feeling scared of flying on planes, then deciding that planes must be dangerous.

Should and Must Statements

This trap is about telling yourself or others how things "should" or "must" be, even if it's not realistic.

Example: After a piano concert, a pianist thinks, "I should not have made any mistakes."

These thoughts can make you feel guilty or angry. If you direct them at others, you might get frustrated when they don't do what you think they "should."

Personalization and Blaming

Personalization

This trap means you take too much blame for things that aren't entirely your fault.

Example: A child in foster care thinks they haven't been adopted because they aren't "loveable enough."
Example: A child gets bad grades. Their mom believes it's because she isn't a good enough parent.

Blaming Others

This is the opposite of personalization. You put all the blame on other people, avoiding your own responsibility. This can lead to a "victim mentality."

Example: Blaming your spouse entirely for problems in your marriage.

Always Being Right

In this trap, you feel like you always have to prove you are correct. Being wrong feels impossible. You might even put your own need to be right above other people's feelings.

Fallacy of Change

This trap means you believe your happiness depends on other people changing their actions. You might think others should change just to suit your needs, or that it's fair to pressure them to change.

Magnifying and Minimizing

Magnification

This is like "making a mountain out of a molehill." You make a small problem or mistake seem much bigger and worse than it is.

Catastrophizing: This is a type of magnification where you imagine the worst possible outcome, even if it's very unlikely. You might feel a situation is unbearable when it's just a bit uncomfortable.

Minimization

This is the opposite of magnification. You make your successes, strengths, or good things seem smaller or less important than they are. You might also make other people's negative traits seem less important.

Example: A person who is feeling sad might think, "I will never be as good as Jane," or "Anyone could have done as well."

Assuming the Worst

Overgeneralizing

This trap means you take one negative event and see it as a never-ending pattern of defeat. If something bad happens once, you expect it to happen again and again.

Example: A young woman goes on a first date, but not a second. She tells her friend, "This always happens to me! I'll never find love!"

To fight this, look at the facts and don't exaggerate your situation.

Disqualifying the Positive

This trap means you ignore or reject good things that happen to you. You might think they "don't count" for some reason. You keep your negative beliefs even when good things prove them wrong.

Example: Someone congratulates you on a job well done, and you think, "They're just being nice."

Mental Filtering

This trap means you only focus on the negative details of a situation and ignore all the good parts.

Example: Andy gets many compliments on his presentation at work, but he also gets one small piece of criticism. For days, Andy only thinks about that one negative comment, forgetting all the positive feedback.

This is like a "drop of ink that discolors a beaker of water." To fight this, think about whether focusing only on the negative is helping or hurting you in the long run.

Changing Your Thinking Traps

Cognitive restructuring (CR) is a popular way to help people identify and change these unhelpful thinking traps. It's often used with people who are feeling sad or depressed. In CR, you and a therapist look at a stressful event. For example, a college student might think that women reject him because he is "worthless." Together, they might create a more realistic thought, like: "I can ask girls on dates. But whether they say yes or no is mostly out of my control. So, I'm not responsible if they say no."

CR helps to get rid of "automatic thoughts" that are negative or unhelpful. By doing this, people can feel less worthless, less anxious, and enjoy things more. CR is a main part of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT).

Making Big Problems Smaller

Decatastrophizing is a technique used in therapy to help you see big problems as less overwhelming. It helps you change your thoughts so that a situation feels less scary or impossible.