Have you ever been in a situation where you had the skills to succeed but were held back by your mentality? Whether it's sagging self-confidence, paralyzing perfectionism, or sabotaging self-doubt, we all have times when we get caught up in what psychologists call cognitive distortions. And as a result, we're limited in trying new things and building on current abilities.
According to a Positive Psychology feature by Courtney E. Ackerman, “Cognitive distortions are biased perspectives we take on ourselves and the world around us. They are irrational thoughts and beliefs that we unknowingly reinforce over time.” Let's identify some of the most common thinking traps, along with an antidote for each so you can get closer to having what Kobe Bryant called the "Mamba Mentality."
1) Catastrophizing
No matter how positive your outlook typically is, you can probably remember plenty of times when you’ve blown something out of all proportion. When you start expecting the worst possible outcome, then you’re catastrophizing. It’s an adult equivalent of a child hearing a noise and imagining that there’s a terrifying beast under the bed – which is unlikely, unless they’ve summoned Sully from Monsters, Inc.
To help curtail catastrophizing, you need to stop thinking emotionally and start looking at the scenario more rationally. “Catastrophizing can lead you down a dark thought spiral quickly. The best thing to do in such a scenario is to immediately bring yourself back to the present,” Mark Travers wrote in an article for Psychology Today. He went on to cite research published in Acta Psychologica that demonstrated how mindfulness is a potent way to improve emotional regulation.
Travers also suggested setting up a daily worry period. This will help prevent your mind from running rampant throughout the day. “If anxious or catastrophic thoughts occur to you when you’re engaged in something important, you can defer them to your ‘worry time’ and focus on the present moment,” he wrote. “It can also ensure that you become aware of and address all your anxieties on a regular basis.”
2) Personalizing
Does it ever feel like someone’s deliberately trying to screw you over? Or, to take that notion one big step farther, that the entire world is dead set against you? Maybe you blame yourself for a group outcome. If so, then you’ve fallen into the thinking trap of personalizing.
This cognitive distortion can also involve trying to blame yourself for a particular outcome. If your rec league basketball team lost, you might say, “We lost because of me,” even though nobody played their best game. Or when your sales team can’t quite close a big deal, you believe that you dropped the ball.
One key to combating personalizing is to reframe how you’re thinking about the situation. If there were multiple people in a group project, realize that others might not have pulled their weight or that you might have just been the victim of chance. Also avoid jumping to conclusions that make you mistakenly think that people are out to get you, affirming that in reality, it’s nothing personal.
“If someone cuts you off in traffic, they are just cutting off a random car, not you, because they have no idea who you are,” Peter Grinspoon wrote in an article for Harvard Health. “So there's no reason to take it personally. To personalize situations like this just makes you upset. If you don't take it personally, it changes it from ‘jerk cut me off’ to ‘people should drive more safely.’”
Another helpful way to tackle personalizing is to challenge the assumptions that prompt you to blame yourself or feel like circumstances are conspiring against you. To do so, take a couple of minutes to stop your spinning thoughts while you implement this handy, three-stage technique that licensed professional counselor Heather Timm calls ICE:
“Identify the thought that indicates you are personalizing.
Call it what it is – a cognitive distortion.
Explore if the thought is valid. Are you really responsible for their happiness, disappointments, or struggles? If you’re not responsible, then acknowledge it.”
3) All or Nothing Thinking/Perfectionism
There’s nothing wrong with having high standards or keeping yourself accountable for your daily efforts. But what about those times when you start needlessly picking holes in your performance? Or when you take a solid result and beat yourself up because things didn’t turn out slightly better? This happens when you allow perfectionism to run amok with all or nothing thinking.
Imagine a tennis player who could only handle a match when they won in straight sets. Now consider how unbearable it would be if they demanded that they claimed each of these sets 6-0, had no unforced errors, and never needed a second serve. Even for an all-time great like Serena Williams or Roger Federer, this would be completely unsustainable.
So why do we so often apply all or nothing thinking to our own lives? The 4.0 student loses it when they get a B, the parent freaks out if their daughter doesn’t make the varsity team, and the CEO has a meltdown if his revenue projections miss the target by one percent. Here’s an antidote to the poison of perfectionism that Jaime R. Herndon provided in a piece for Verywell Health:
“Avoid absolutes: Things are rarely black and white. If that's how you see it, your feelings may be colored by facts that are not entirely true. Rather than digging in your heels, question your feelings.”
The best teams understand that not every victory can be a lopsided blowout, and that they will sometimes need to win ugly. Even if you have to put a check mark in the “L” column, list three ways that you did well in the losing efforts. Also consider what lessons you’ve learned that you can apply next time to make winning more likely.
When tackling all or nothing thinking, an additional mindset trick is to redefine what you consider successful or unsuccessful. In an article for Science of People, Galina Hitching explained, “When your definitions of success are over-the-top unrealistic, this sets you up to always feel like you are never good enough. Begin to set realistic goals for yourself and make room for not meeting those goals.”
She went on to give the example of wanting to write 10,000 words for your new novel by the end of the week. You usually manage 8,000 but reach 9,000 by Friday. “All-or-nothing thinking might make you feel like the whole week was a total failure,” Hitching wrote. “In reality, you just wrote 1,000 more words than you usually do. This is cause for celebration! If you take the time to redefine success, you can step back, look at what has happened rationally and come to a new conclusion.”