Negative Thinking Patterns – Unhelpful distortions in our thinking

Negative Thinking Patterns

Negative thinking patterns, often referred to as cognitive distortions, are common ways that our minds convince us of something that isn’t really true.When this happens, our minds are thinking in specific ways that reinforce some sort of negativity. These unhelpful thoughts often sound rational and accurate, or at least reasonable, but they often only really serve to keep us down.

Perhaps more importantly, these negative thinking patterns are really unhelpful. When we are thinking and feeling in these negative patterns, it affects not only our wellbeing, but also the actions we take and the outcomes we achieve. Remember, the “See, Do, Get” model. The way we see the world affects how we act in it, and what we get from it.

Interestingly, many people tend to experience similar patterns in their negative thinking. In other words, lots of us apply the same types of negative lenses to our interpretations of the world, at least when we are not at our best.

Six common negative thinking patterns are as follow:

Ignoring the positives

This involves magnifying all the negative aspects of a situation and disregarding all the positive aspects. No situation is ever completely bad, but they can feel like it if we ignore the positives.

An example of this in the workplace could be that when you receive feedback, you only focus on the things you can do better and ignore all the things you do well.

All or nothing thinking (polarised thinking)

This involves thinking things are only ever good or bad, there are not shades of grey. It often means we’re thinking that if something is 99% good, then is is still not good enough, so it’s bad. This misses the fact that often things are pretty good!

An example of this in the workplace could be that you deliver a presentation that goes great for 19 of the 20 slides you present, but forget a few points on one of the slides. Instead of thinking that you did a 95% great job, you instead think the whole presentation was a failure.

Catastrophic Thinking

This often involves expecting disaster to strike, no matter what the real state of the world is. This can also be referred to as “magnifying or minimising”. This sometimes appears through the use of unhelpful “what if” questions whenever a new situation occurs, e.g. “What if tragedy strikes?” of “What if it all goes wrong?”).

An example of this in the workplace could be that you chain events together with unhelpful “what if” questions so that when you leave home two minutes late, you think you’ll miss your bus, then you’ll be late for work, then you’ll miss a meeting, then you won’t know some key information, then you’ll underperform in your role, then you’ll get a bad rating, then you’ll be fired, then you’ll loose your house… and so on.

Predicting the Future

This often involves anticipating that whatever situations in the future you might be facing will turn out badly, no matter what you do. With this thinking pattern the future is constantly predicted in a negative framing. Quite often when predicting the future like this, individuals become convinced that their negative predictions are already established fact.

An example of this in the workplace could be that you have a meeting next week and you find yourself constantly day-dream about it going dreadfully, regardless of what you do. This goes on so much that you are sure the meeting will be dreadful and are even planning what you do when that certainty occurs.

Mind Reading

This involves making the assumption that you know what others are thinking, and that it is negative. Whatever the context, you feel that you can intuit what is going on in their minds and that they are inevitably thinking negatively about the context, and probably about, your role in it and your contributions to it.

An example of this in the workplace could that you’re tasked with organizing a work social and you automatically assume that everyone you invite will decline the event because they dislike you.

Personalising

This one is a bit of a funny one. It involves believing that whenever anything goes wrong, that you’re to blame for it. It’s a strange one because while it is very negative and projects you doing everything wrong, it’s also kind of self-important, implicitly assuming that you have power and influence enough to be the cause of things going wrong.

An example of this in the workplace could be that you see a colleague being upset in a meeting and you automatically think that you must have done something to upset them, that you must be the cause of this upset.

So how does knowing this help us?

It’s clearly the case that these unhelpful thinking patterns lead to negative experiences and outcomes for the people who experience them excessively.When this happens people may experience negative mental health, may experience an exacerbating reduction in performance and may damage their relationships, further compounding negative thoughts and feelings.

Obviously, then, we’d like to change our thinking patterns if they fall into these negative traps. Self-awareness is a great starting point for a lot of personal growth and change, and it’s the same case here. Recognising these negative patters is a helpful first step on the journey to reducing the impact they have on our lives.

In terms of how we actually mitigate their impact, there are various thoughts and views, approaches, talking remedies and therapies. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is one of the most famous. Part of what is involved in this approach is learning to change our thoughts and feelings. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is another approach. It’s focus is more on accepting negative thoughts and feelings and taking helpful actions despite them.

Covey’s “See, Do, Get” framing is a nice little model that’s helpful and related to this. It’s also definitely worth checking out emotional intelligence and meta-emotion and meta-cognition.

It could also be helpful to have a look at the Wheel of Wellbeing as well as the idea of subjective wellbeing, and how we might change that.

You can learn more about CBT and ACT on their wikipedia pages, which are linked.

This podcast on psychological flexibility may also be helpful:

This is a very helpful little tool / framework for helping us identify and acknowledge some of our negative thinking patterns. Quite often we don’t even realise how much of a patter we’ve fallen into, but when we see them written down it all becomes a bit clear. There’s also something nice in knowing we’re not the only ones who fall into these little patterns!

We sometimes use these in sessions and workshops on things like mindset or positive thinking. We might share the six categories, then give participants some examples of self-talk and ask them which pattern it might relate too (often they cross over). The purpose is really just to get the conversation started. We also sometimes use a “mind-traps” assessment that basically helps people identify which types of negative thinking patterns they are most drawn too, which we then use to start conversations about their behaviours and potential growth from that moment of realisation.

Overall we think this stuff is very helpful in both our own lives and the workplace.

We have no specific sources for this, though we know a lot of this comes from CBT. If you have any specific sources we should reference, please let us know and we will do so.

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