“Cognitive Errors”

What are cognitive errors?

• We all have patterns of thinking, and this may impact our emotional
state and behavior.
• Sometimes our patterns are less than accurate.
• These are cognitive errors or cognitive distortions, and they typically
fall into certain categories.
• These inaccurate thoughts are usually used to reinforce negative
thinking or emotions.
 Common cognitive errors
1. Filtering.
• We take the negative details and magnify them while filtering out all positive aspects of a
situation. For instance, a person may pick out a single, unpleasant detail and dwell on it
exclusively so that their vision of reality becomes darkened or distorted.
• Example:
You undertake a presentation at work which is complimented and praised by ninety-five percent of
the team - but you dwell and focus on the five percent of feedback that you could have done a
slightly better job. This leaves you convinced you didn't do well enough and not only don't you
recognize and enjoy the praise being offered but you decide not to participate in future events
2. Polarized thinking (or “black and white” thinking).
• In polarized thinking, things are either “black-or-white.” We have to be perfect or we’re a
failure — there is no middle ground.
• You place people or situations in “either/or” categories, with no shades of gray or allowing for
the complexity of most people and situations. If your performance falls short of perfect, you
see yourself as a total failure.

• Example:
• If you get eighty per cent on a test, you feel like a failure that you didn't get a perfect score.
3. Overgeneralization.
• In this cognitive distortion, we come to a general conclusion based on a single incident or a
single piece of evidence. If something bad happens only once, we expect it to happen over and
over again. A person may see a single, unpleasant event as part of a never-ending pattern of
defeat.

• Example:
• If you fail to get a job you interview for, you decide you are never going to get a job. Or you might
give one unsuccessful presentation and that is it, you decide you are never going to present ever.
4. Jumping to conclusions.
• Without individuals saying so, we know what they are feeling and why they act the way they
do. In particular, we are able to determine how people are feeling toward us.

• Example
• A person may conclude that someone is reacting negatively toward them but doesn’t actually bother
to find out if they are correct.
• A person may anticipate that things will turn out badly, and will feel convinced that their prediction
is already an established fact.
• You are at a party and you don't like what you are wearing and you decide 'everyone is laughing at
me' (mind reading).
• You are going to take your drivers test and 'know' that you are going to fail (fortune-telling).
5. Catastrophizing.
• We expect disaster to strike, no matter what. This is also referred to as “magnifying or
minimizing.”
• We hear about a problem and use what if questions (e.G., “What if tragedy strikes?” “What if it
happens to me?”).
• A person might exaggerate the importance of insignificant events (such as their mistake, or
someone else’s achievement). Or they may inappropriately shrink the magnitude of significant
events until they appear tiny (for example, a person’s own desirable qualities or someone else’s
imperfections).

• Example:
• You send out the wrong letter to a client at work, and this turns into “i will now lose my job, and then
i won’t be able to pay my bills, and then i will lose my house.”
6. Personalization.
• Personalization is a distortion where a person believes that everything others do or say is
some kind of direct, personal reaction to the person.
• We also compare ourselves to others trying to determine who is smarter, better looking, etc.
• A person engaging in personalization may also see themselves as the cause of some unhealthy
external event that they were not responsible for.

• Example
• “We were late to the dinner party and caused the hostess to overcook the meal. If I had only pushed
my husband to leave on time, this wouldn’t have happened.”
• You feel it's all your fault that your baby brother injured his foot even though you weren't at home
when it happened but were out shopping.
7. Control fallacies.
• If we feel externally controlled, we see ourselves as helpless a victim of fate. For example, “I
can’t help it if the quality of the work is poor, my boss demanded I work overtime on it.”

• The fallacy of internal control has us assuming responsibility for the pain and happiness of
everyone around us. For example, “why aren’t you happy? Is it because of something I did?”
8. Should’s / ought's / musts
• We have a list of ironclad rules about how others and we should behave.
• People who break the rules make us angry, and we feel guilty when we violate these rules.
• A person may often believe they are trying to motivate themselves with shoulds and shouldn’ts,
as if they have to be punished before they can do anything.
• Example
• “I really should exercise. I shouldn’t be so lazy.”
• You don't like playing tennis but take lessons as you feel you 'should', and that you 'shouldn't' make
so many mistakes on the court, and that your coach 'ought to' be stricter on you. You also feel that
you 'must' please him by trying harder.
9. Emotional Reasoning.
• Emotional reasoning is when we assume feelings reflect fact, regardless of the evidence. The idea
here is “I feel it, therefore it must be true”. Such thinking can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies
whereby our thoughts can end up eliciting the very behavior we predicted, just because we
changed our behavior in accordance with that thought.

• Example
• If you think “I feel ugly and stupid, so then I must actually be ugly and stupid” you might then stop
buying yourself new clothes and start doing poorly at the course you are taking at university, even
though you look fine and were doing very well at school.
• I am a failure because i feel like a failure
10. Global Labeling.
• Labelling is an extreme form of 'all or nothing' thinking and overgeneralization. Rather than
describing a specific behavior, an individual instead assigns a negative and highly emotive label to
themselves or others that leaves no room for change.
• Example
• You make a mistake on a form you filled out and it's sent back to you in the post. So you decide “i'm
such a loser” or “I'm so stupid” rather than thinking “I made a mistake as I had a busy day when I was
filling this out”.

• When someone else’s behavior rubs a person the wrong way, they may attach an unhealthy label
to him, such as “he’s a real jerk.”
• Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally
loaded. For example, instead of saying someone drops her children off at daycare every day, a
person who is mislabeling might say that “she abandons her children to strangers.”
 Class Activities

• At the moment, identifying stressors, how it is effecting your body

• Eft(emotional freedom technique) to releases instant stress
• Tapping on different parts of body starting from head till end and deep breathing simultaneously.