Bad feelings like depression, anxiety, guilt, worthlessness, frustration, and anger are often caused by distorted thinking.
Distorted thinking creates unnecessary stress and drama in your life. It can also destroy your friendships and both your professional and personal relationships.
Once you correct the distortions and learn to judge situations more accurately and realistically, you will totally transform the results you get in life for the better.
Read through the following list and identify which ones you indulge in most:
The 12 Most Common Forms Of Distorted Thinking
1. All-or-nothing thinking: You view things in absolute, black-and-white categories
2. Overgeneralisation: You look at a negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
3. Mental filter: You focus on the negatives and ignore the positives.
4. Discounting the positives: You refuse to acknowledge all of your positive qualities and accomplishments.
5. Jumping to conclusions: You conclude things are bad despite definite evidence to prove this.
6. Mind reading: You automatically presume that people are reacting negatively to you.
7. Fortune-telling: You predict that things will end badly.
8. Magnification or minimisation: You blow things way out of proportion or you shrink their importance.
9. Emotional reasoning: You reason from how you feel: “I feel stupid, so I must be stupid”
10. “Should” statements: You criticise yourself or other people with “shoulds”, “shouldn’ts”, “musts”, “oughts” and “have-tos”
11. Labelling: Instead of saying, “I made a mistake”, you tell yourself, “I’m worthless” or “a failure.”
12. Blame: You blame yourself for something you weren’t entirely responsible for, or you blame other people and overlook ways that you contributed to a problem.
While hypnotherapy doesn’t magically remove depression, it directly targets the distorted thinking patterns that often create, maintain, or worsen depression. It works by helping the brain access a state where beliefs, emotions, and automatic thoughts become more flexible and open to change.
