The Negative Thoughts You Don't Realise You Have

Are you someone who runs on negativity? Even people who tend to look on the bright side can lose heart when negative thoughts take hold, holding out little hope for themselves or the future. And even if you are not a negative person yourself, you will surely have met friends caught up in negative thinking. Beyond getting fixated on it or simply "venting", have you ever taken a careful look at what these negative thoughts really are?

The Cognitive Model of Depression

Regarded as the father of cognitive therapy, the psychologist Aaron Beck set out a number of cognitive distortions in his Cognitive Model of Depression — irrational beliefs people hold about themselves, the future or the world. He called these negative automatic thoughts, and they unconsciously shape a person's outlook and emotions. In severe cases they can leave a person feeling helpless and hopeless, and may even develop into depression. Before looking at how a cognitive therapist works with these thoughts, let us first go through the 7 negative thoughts below — and consider whether you might already be under their influence.

Dichotomous Thinking

Dichotomous thinking is also known as all-or-nothing thinking. People affected by it cannot make sense of the space between two extremes — they fail to recognise the grey between black and white. Even a minor setback can swing their thinking from the good end straight to the catastrophic other end. A single failure leads them to conclude, mistakenly, that they are a complete failure. They cannot accept any imperfection in themselves or in the world, and often feel an enormous sense of defeat over the smallest flaw.

Overgeneralising

Overgeneralising is close in concept to dichotomous thinking: after a single failure, a person decides that everything they do in future is bound to fail. Under overgeneralising, one experience of being rejected makes a person feel they will never be accepted by anyone; one careless mistake makes them feel they will keep getting things wrong from now on — even when the earlier mistake was a one-off.

Catastrophising

Catastrophising makes a person decide that a disaster is coming simply because of a small matter. Fail one quiz (a small matter), and they conclude they will not pass at all, and may not even graduate (a disaster). Have one disagreement with a friend (a small matter), and they decide the friendship is over — and may even lose all their friends over someone's idle gossip (a disaster).

Mind Reading

Mind reading does not, of course, mean that a person can read what others are thinking. Rather, it is when a person mistakenly assumes they already know what someone else is thinking, without bothering to check. When they report to their boss, the boss responds with just a few cool words; when they pour out their troubles to a friend, the friend's expression gives little away. Mind reading makes a person assume the boss is thoroughly displeased with them, or that the friend finds them a nuisance. But the truth may be that the boss had other matters to deal with that day, and the friend was simply feeling a little unwell or tired. Without checking whether these thoughts hold true, a person can magnify such misunderstandings on the back of other negative thoughts, clouding their own judgement and emotions.

"Should" Statements

Do you ever feel that you "must" be a hardworking person? That you "must" outdo everyone else? That other people "must" live up to your expectations? These "should" thoughts may look like a way of motivating yourself, but neither you nor anyone else will ever be perfect. "Should" thoughts set an impossibly high standard for ourselves and for others: failing to meet these expectations triggers guilt and self-criticism, while other people's imperfections bring on intense disappointment, anger and other emotional distress.

Personalisation

Personalisation leads a person to pin a mistake on themselves as their own problem, blaming themselves for a team's failure even though they were not the main cause of it. This pattern of thinking brings irrational self-blame, making a person shoulder far more guilt than is necessary.

Minimisation

Most of the negative automatic thoughts above relate to negative events; minimisation, by contrast, is when an affected person plays down positive outcomes and their own abilities. When they succeed at work and earn praise from their boss and colleagues, minimisation dismisses these positive outcomes as trivial, incapable of making any real difference. Their strengths are "minimised" in the same way: when judging their own abilities they overlook these strengths and fixate only on their shortcomings — in other words, they belittle themselves. It is worth noting that minimisation is not the same as humility. Humility is the virtue of self-awareness without arrogance, whereas minimisation is a distorted and dysfunctional form of negative thinking.

How Negative Thoughts Can Be Corrected

Negative thoughts may have been deeply entrenched in our minds for years, and trying to change long-held, ingrained thinking on our own and in a short space of time is a genuinely difficult thing to do. Even so, we can still take a leaf out of how counsellors or therapists guide people in changing these thoughts.

If you have noticed it, beyond being "negative" these thoughts also share a central theme: they ignore the evidence of reality. The reason they are regarded as irrational is precisely that these negative automatic thoughts disregard the objective, positive outcomes in reality, and wrongly persist with the negative views they have always held.

In response to these views, a counsellor will invite a person to come up with reasons that support or oppose these thoughts — for example, "My friends have never reached out to care about me, so they must all dislike me", versus "My friends are there for me when I need them, so perhaps they do care about me after all". By repeatedly re-examining the negative thoughts and the relevant evidence, a person comes to recognise, with the counsellor's help, that their negative thoughts are mistaken and ought to be corrected.

A counsellor untangles complex negative thoughts through a series of questions — for instance, trying to interpret an event from another angle, imagining what advice you would give a friend facing the same situation, or how a difficulty might be resolved. These questions help a person approach an event, and the difficulties they encounter, from a different perspective, and revise the automatic thoughts they have long held.

The Cognitive Model of Depression and the negative automatic thoughts within it are among the most highly regarded theories today. Even if reflection on its own makes change difficult, recognising these negative thoughts is already the first step towards change. When we or our friends are giving off negativity, we can ask ourselves whether we are being influenced by these thoughts, and adjust accordingly. There are now plenty of self-help books on the market that apply cognitive behavioural therapy; readers who are affected by negative thinking and keen to learn more can seek out resources to change their own thought patterns, and set about changing their lives.

TreeholeHK offers psychological services tailored to your needs, drawing on psychology to help you handle the difficulties of everyday life. These services give you space to talk things through freely, offer appropriate guidance and emotional support, help you make sense of past experiences and understand yourself, and draw on your inner resources to face life.