How your brain keeps lying to you..

Our mind is considered to be a continuous and flowing pool of thoughts, we are continuously thinking of one thing or another in ways maybe even we do not understand many times. Following a never-ending train of thoughts. But what are these thoughts and where do they actually emerge from? Looking into thoughts from a psychological perspective, we can pinpoint that thought are a part of the cognitive processing of the brain. Our thoughts are our ideas, opinions, attribution, and many times even prejudices we make regarding things, about oneself, or even the world around us. It is the way one perceives a situation in a particular, it is the difference people carry between themselves depending on their perspectives. But our thoughts aren’t made-up from one but various different situations and scenarios that one faces in their lives, and based on this a person’s perspectives is formulated. These cognitive process if are positive, bring you success and keep you away from any type of mental illnesses, but if not it is something one needs to work towards and change.

Cognitive Distortions: 

A person who has faced a lot of hardships and adversities in life is likely to have developed a completely negative mindset for themselves and against everything around them. It is such a habituated process for them, to perceive things negatively that one cannot think of things in any other way but this. Such thinking processes are known as ‘Cognitive Distortions’, that is habitual errors in thinking, seeing the world around them in an inaccurate and negative way. For example, thinking ‘everything can only go wrong in my life’, ‘everyone hates me and that is why they always give a reason to not visit’. All of you must have thought in such a way, on various occasions but having a continuous and habitual mindset about everything in life. We often overlook the impact these negative mindsets can have on our lives, these can turn out to be the major causes for depression, anxiety or a reason for a person’s low self-esteem, in short, cognitive distortions are said to be a major reason for psychological distress and damage. Negativity and over assuming things never really helped anyone. It is in this way that our brain keeps lying to us, it tells us to take to things personally and blame ourselves, changing our perception and making us look at things negatively. These distortions have been shown to contribute positively to symptoms of depression, suggesting that symptoms of depression are more likely to occur where cognitive distortions abound. There are various different types of cognitive distortions that I am going to list out down below:

• Polarized Thinking: A polarised thinking can also be described as an ‘All-or-nothing-thinking’. People who have such a pattern of thinking thinks of things in absolutes, either it is white or it is black. Letting no things stand a common ground, here the distortion being of following an extreme point of view. For example, when having an exam they have not very well prepared for, they think either they are going to pass with 100 percent marks or fail the exam succumbing to the very last rank in the class. Not thinking of achieving a rather middle or average mark in the class. The problem with such a type of thinking is that they end up expecting too much or too little from themselves, making themselves fall in any of the two case scenarios, blaming if they could not achieve a 100% even if they did achieve a 90 above percentage. Keeping unrealistic expectations from oneself or even others in various cases.
• Overgeneralization: People who have such a thinking pattern as the name suggests, overgeneralize things a lot. By this, it means, that they think if one event in life goes wrong all the upcoming events are bound to go wrong and they are going to fail no matter what they do. There is a constant and rigid negative pattern followed. For example, if a person sees themselves failing to complete or achieve a certain thing in life, they think they are a complete failure and are bound to achieve absolutely nothing in life. People with such a mind-set often forget that failure is the first step towards success. It has also been found that people who have such a mindset are likely to be suffering or be at risk of suffering from disorders like anxiety and depression.
• Over-Personalisation and Blaming: This is a type of mindset under which people take things a bit way too personally, anything anyone says is taken for a fact and anything anyone does is considered to be a reaction to their doings. Blaming everything that happens on themselves, even when they might nowhere be at fault. For example, when a group project goes wrong, and your group fails to present that you planned to, a person with this type of cognitive distortion is likely that blame and say that everything went wrong because of them and that they are the only one to be held responsible when actually there could be so many other things that could have gone wrong, and the team as a whole was to be blamed and not just that person or they might feel the teacher was mad at you, because of what you did and thus failed you in the presentation. This can again be a harmful mindset for a person because the person is single-handedly trying to put themselves down. People with this type of mindset are again prone to disorders like anxiety and depression.
• Labeling: This type of distortion is quite common among people, when people go wrong somewhere instead of saying they did something the wrong way, they label themselves with something usually negative and horrendous that might really have nothing or have zero association or degree to what they have done. Defining themselves or even others judging them based on a small event or a particular behavior. For example, in case a person with such a mindset sees themselves as getting mad on a particular event, they might label themselves or even others as ‘overly aggressive’ or ‘short-tempered’ or even as ‘manic’. When indeed the reaction of getting aggressive might have been quite reasonable considering the event along with which it took place. Constantly labeling people around or oneself has a huge effect on your self-esteem and belittling yourself does you no good, even people do not like to be labeled all the time by others.
• Should Statement: People with such a mindset believe and say they ‘SHOULD’ do certain things in certain periods of time, and if not they see and say themselves to be incompetent and bound to be unsuccessful. When you have such a cognitive distortion, you talk to yourselves in an ‘ought’, ‘must’ and ‘should’ way, telling yourself that things need to be done only a particular way. For example, when setting goals, if you write ‘I should complete this homework by today night’ but instead when you do ‘half the homework by night’ you feel you aren’t putting in enough efforts when indeed you did work towards it and tried to give it your best. Such type of thinking is again putting yourself down and a major cause for building up of anxiety and pressure on oneself.
• Mental Filter: Such type of cognitive distortion can also be said to as ‘Negativity Bias’ wherein the person just fails to notice any positive thing in life and only can think of what all can go wrong and how everything is bad, looking at everything from a negative point of view. When one chooses to focus on the negativities in life, they are going to see that the whole world is upside down and how anything and everything can go wrong, but then just like, if it is bad, there is good too; if there are negative things in life, there are positive things too, which one can oh so leniently fail to take a not of. This type of distortion is only likely to increase a person’s anxiety and leave them in a hopeless and desperate state.

Reasons for the development of Cognitive Distortions:

• A result of noticing people following such negative mind-sets.
• Learning and understanding from your adversities.
• Such types of thoughts can be said to be rooted in the internalized family or cultural expectations that are not appropriate for any individual.
• Many people use cognitive distortions as a way to cope with things and problems in their life.
• It is said to be developed as an evolutionary survival method.

Ways to question your cognitive distortions:

Since you are human, at one time or another, you have possibly fallen for a few of the various cognitive illusions. The ability to recognize and alter or correct these flawed habits of thought is the difference between those who sometimes fall into a mental distortion and those who struggle with them on a longer-term basis. As with many life skills and abilities, one can be much better at this than others, but you can strengthen the ability to identify and respond to these distortions with practice. One can challenge their brains by questioning their distortions, asking:

• How do I know the way I am thinking is the only accurate way out??
• Am I bringing myself despair by blaming myself for everything??
• How can I check and find out my assumptions/beliefs? And if they’re precise? Do I have a trusted friend I can look out for?
• With these thoughts? Is this reasoning helpful?
• Are there no other ways that I might think about myself or this situation?
• Do I unfairly blame myself?
• Is it really in my power?
• Am I generalizing too much?
• Do I make assumptions?
• What will I say in this case to a friend?
• Is it possible to search for “shades of gray”?
• Should I believe the worst?