Reframing Negative Thoughts 💜
Hello everyone! Today I wanted to talk a bit about challenging and reframing our negative thinking. Negative thoughts often come quickly, before we are able to assess and question them. Cognitive distortions are inaccurate, negative thoughts that cause the person experiencing them distress. To be able to challenge our negative thoughts, it’s important to understand some of the different types of them. Let’s take a look at five common cognitive distortions:
🌸 Personalization: Blaming yourself for a situation you are not personally responsible for.
🌙 Example: “I was late to the party, which caused everyone to have a bad time.”
How would we reframe this thought? When we take a look at it, we see that the person uses the word “caused.” They are taking the blame for the attitude of the party’s guests.
💌 Reframed thought: “I had fun with my friends for the 30 minutes that I was there, and they were happy that I showed up.”
🌸 All-or-nothing thinking: Seeing situations in the extremes. Also known as black or white thinking.
🌙 Example: “Things will never get better. I am always upset.”
Looking at this example, the words “never” and “always” show evidence of this being all-or-nothing thinking. Take some time to ask yourself if you have been pushing yourself and setting the expectations you have for yourself too high.
💌 Reframed thought: “Nobody is happy all of the time. My emotions are always fluctuating.”
🌸 Jumping to conclusions: Assuming the outcome of a situation before it happens, often without evidence.
🌙 Example: “I am going to fail this math test next week. I am so unprepared!”
This thought is predicting the outcome of a future event. The test is next week, which means this person has time to prepare.
💌 Reframed thought: “I can balance my time this week so that I am able to study for my math test as well as take care of my own mental health. I have time to prepare.”
🌸 Mind reading: Assuming what others are thinking/how others feel about us or a situation.
🌙 Example: “My friends think that I’m a burden when I open up to them about how I’m feeling.”
The person experiencing this thought may be fearful of being a burden, but their friends have not given them any reason to feel this way.
It’s important to ask ourselves what evidence we have been given to believe that the other person/people feel this way. What has this friend said to them when they ask for support? How does this friend act around them?
💌 Reframed thought: “When I open up to my friends, they listen to me and support me because they care about me.”
🌸 Catastrophizing: Expecting the worst, exaggerating the situation without evidence.
🌙 Example: “If I fail this test, I won’t pass this class and I’ll fail school.”
If this person is fearful about taking their test, they may think of the worst possible outcome, which is failing, and then the worst possible outcome which could come out of failing, which is failing the class. Notice how the thought just spirals out of control?
💌 Reframed thought: “I didn’t study very hard for this test, but it is only one test out of the semester. I will study harder next time to get my grade back up.”
Questions to ask yourself when you encounter a negative thought:
➡️ “Who do I have in my support system that I can talk to when I am experiencing a negative thought?”
➡️ “What are some coping skills that have helped me in the past that I can do independently? With others?”
➡️ “When do I experience negative thoughts most often? Is there a particular time of day or person I’m around when they are the most frequent?”
➡️ “How have I been managing my time recently? Have I been taking time for self-care?”
➡️ “When I start to experience a negative thought, how can I remember to work on reframing it?”
These are only five of the common types of negative thoughts! There are many more. Here are some resources to learn more about negative thinking (all clickable links):
15 Common cognitive distortions
Reframing cognitive distortions
What are cognitive distortions and how do we reframe them?
Thank you all so much for reading through this post! Learning about the different types of negative thinking can help us reframe our own thoughts as well as help support others dealing with their own negative thoughts.
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It’s impossible to reframe from having negative thoughts I am negative all the time
@practicalStrawberries2858 I totally get that it can feel impossible. It can be super hard to lift yourself out of that darkness when you feel like the only thoughts you experience are negative. I hope you're able to get some support here and possibly take something from this post c:
Last night I was fuming over the personal attacks against me and then my friend on a different social media platform. She had posted that she didn't understand why being Asian-American had made her an object of hate. I commented as compassionately as I could. That's when the racist attacked me personally. And then attacked her personally. Reporting him to the social media platform yielded nothing. Apparently the site's community rules were not violated when he repeatedly told me to leave the country, told her to leave, and made statements of innuendo. She was very hurt by his words. Words have consequences. Despite how dark my depression was, the anger I felt toward that racist reminded me how we are all valuable and should be respected as human beings. That feeling of worth for myself was almost gone. Before I read those comments I had been thinking that everyone in my life would be better off if I were gone. I wasn't considering making a mistake, just wishing so everyone could be without me. But after that racist said those hateful things, trying to make me feel 'less than', the anger I felt actually did me some good. My sense of self-worth is quite low. But now I'm questioning why I think I'm burden, why I don't believe I have anything to offer, why I think I should just be alone. Wow. That last paragraph was hard to write. If I have a point to make, it's that I had been so depressed up to last night, that I didn't even realize that my own way of thinking was contributing to depression. And it took a personal attack against me, my belief that we are all equally human worth dignity and respect - and that I had been saying that about everyone except myself. I had simply accepted that a minor brain injury was the sole reason for feeling so depressed. I did not realize that while brain injury might be a push toward depression, negative thinking is always part of depression. I have to question the negative thoughts and cognitive distortions mentioned above. Pretty fortuitous that the above post was the second thing I had read today. I need to go back and read that again. Maybe a few times lol. I am a human being with worth and dignity. I'll begin with that, and question the thoughts that led me into depression.
<3
I relate to almost all of these. Thanks for sharing 🙂
Jumping to conclusions: as a technical writer, I’m often asked to guesstimate how long my project input will take. I “jump to conclusions” and add as as much as one month to that calculation as my response to my superiors.
Amazing