Hippocrates
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I got these from David Burns' excellent book "Feeling Good". "Cognitive Distortion" basically means "irrational thinking". I'll put some of my thoughts after each point.
COGNITIVE DISTORTIONS
1. All or Nothing Thinking: You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.
1. You see an attractive girl. You can imagine only two possible things that can happen if you talk to her: either she turns out to be the greatest mate on the planet and the two of you get married and live in Sunshine Land forever eating milk and drinking honey, or she discovers that you are in fact Adolf Hitler reincarnated, screams, and turns you over to the police, who cut your testicles off and then beat you to death. Nothing in between. Of course the reality is going to be somewhere in between. And what it will be you won't know unless you talk to her.
2. Overgeneralization: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
2. You failed in love in the past and now believe that you are a King Loser who will never feel a soft feminine caress again. Every girl in the world is exactly the same as the girl who rejected you. They all want nothing to do with you, just like that one girl. Wroooong... girls are different. Some will like you, some won't. Come on, you're not attracted to every girl you meet either, but you are attracted to some.
3. Mental Filter: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that colors the entire beaker of water.
3. You sit in your room at night burning a candle and fiercely brooding over a failure that happened a week ago when a girl said she wanted to just be friends. You forget that before that you'd gone out with a few girls, and slept with a few. When you go to buy groceries you don't notice that girls are checking you out, smiling at you, and so on because your attention is occupied with a failure that has bloomed to fill the crevices of your mind. You don't notice that some girls actually like you, and so you inadvertently make your dumb mental filter almost accurate.
4. Disqualifying the Positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting that they “don’t count” for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is negated by your everyday experiences.
4. When you go get coffee a girl waiting in line next to you starts flirting with you. You do nothing. When you get home you think to yourself, "Ah, she wouldn't have done that if she knew what kind of a loser I really am", and forget all about her so that you can get back to moping.
5. Jumping to Conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion. (a) Mind reading. You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don’t bother to check this out. (b) The Fortune Teller Error. You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.
5. You see a hot girl. Instantly you think "She knows I'm staring at her. She thinks I'm a horndog. I have no chance." The proof? The proof you give yourself is five seconds of unscientific thinking that, if written down step by step, would be laughed at by any logician in the world. You don't know if she actually knows you're staring at her. You don't actually know if she likes being stared at or not. You don't actually know whether she likes horndogs or not. You DON'T ACTUALLY KNOW whether you have a chance or not. You DON'T ACTUALLY KNOW how she will respond. The only way to find out, unless you have the observational deductive skill of Sherlock Holmes, is to talk to her. Then you'll know for sure. Until then it's just baseless speculation.
6. Magnification (Catastrophizing) or Minimization: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow’s imperfections). This is also called the “binocular trick.”
6. You brood over the fact that your penis is half an inch smaller than "average" and forget the fact that your IQ is 150% higher than average, the last five people you met told you that you were interesting to hang out with, and you got an 8 on amihotornot.com. You give the former thought ten minutes of attention for every one minute you give the latter thought.
7. Emotional Reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.”
7. You feel scared when in the presence of a gorgeous woman. Therefore you assume that she is in fact dangerous to you. Rationally speaking, there is nothing she can do to hurt you. Just because you're scared does not mean you are in danger. If she has a gun and has an insane hatred for people with your name, well, that's dangerous.... her being gorgeous? Not dangerous.
8. Should Statements: “You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn’ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. “Musts” and “oughts” are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.
8. You start thinking "I should really get this woman problem of mine solved", and when you sit on your butt instead of going out, you feel guilty before yourself, forgetting that, well, it's fun to sit on your butt. Before long, the whole woman area of life has become an intolerable burden to you, more like US Army basic training than a fun, and OPTIONAL, human pleasure. Every time you fail to approach a woman you reproach yourself. But in truth, the LESS seriously you approach the matter, the better you do, and the MORE seriously you approach the matter, the more liable you are to become a wound-up alt.seduction.fast kind of weirdo, someone who has more fun seducing a woman than being with her.
9. Labeling and Mislabeling: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser.” When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: “He’s a goddam louse.” Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.
9. A girl rejects you and you think "I'm a loser". You don't realize that there is no actual absolute definition of the word "loser", that in any case everybody loses sometime, and that there is almost certainly nobody in the world who has never been turned down by a woman except people who never approached a woman.
10. Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.
10. You're with a girl and say something that pisses her off. You blame yourself viciously for pissing her off instead of just accepting that she is the kind of person who is offended by that kind of remark, and neither you nor her is to blame for your difference of temperament. You start to think how screwy you are instead of the more accurate thought, "If this is how she reacts to what I said, she may not actually be fun to be with."
Hope it helps,
Good luck,
Hippocrates
COGNITIVE DISTORTIONS
1. All or Nothing Thinking: You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.
1. You see an attractive girl. You can imagine only two possible things that can happen if you talk to her: either she turns out to be the greatest mate on the planet and the two of you get married and live in Sunshine Land forever eating milk and drinking honey, or she discovers that you are in fact Adolf Hitler reincarnated, screams, and turns you over to the police, who cut your testicles off and then beat you to death. Nothing in between. Of course the reality is going to be somewhere in between. And what it will be you won't know unless you talk to her.
2. Overgeneralization: You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
2. You failed in love in the past and now believe that you are a King Loser who will never feel a soft feminine caress again. Every girl in the world is exactly the same as the girl who rejected you. They all want nothing to do with you, just like that one girl. Wroooong... girls are different. Some will like you, some won't. Come on, you're not attracted to every girl you meet either, but you are attracted to some.
3. Mental Filter: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that colors the entire beaker of water.
3. You sit in your room at night burning a candle and fiercely brooding over a failure that happened a week ago when a girl said she wanted to just be friends. You forget that before that you'd gone out with a few girls, and slept with a few. When you go to buy groceries you don't notice that girls are checking you out, smiling at you, and so on because your attention is occupied with a failure that has bloomed to fill the crevices of your mind. You don't notice that some girls actually like you, and so you inadvertently make your dumb mental filter almost accurate.
4. Disqualifying the Positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting that they “don’t count” for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is negated by your everyday experiences.
4. When you go get coffee a girl waiting in line next to you starts flirting with you. You do nothing. When you get home you think to yourself, "Ah, she wouldn't have done that if she knew what kind of a loser I really am", and forget all about her so that you can get back to moping.
5. Jumping to Conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion. (a) Mind reading. You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don’t bother to check this out. (b) The Fortune Teller Error. You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact.
5. You see a hot girl. Instantly you think "She knows I'm staring at her. She thinks I'm a horndog. I have no chance." The proof? The proof you give yourself is five seconds of unscientific thinking that, if written down step by step, would be laughed at by any logician in the world. You don't know if she actually knows you're staring at her. You don't actually know if she likes being stared at or not. You don't actually know whether she likes horndogs or not. You DON'T ACTUALLY KNOW whether you have a chance or not. You DON'T ACTUALLY KNOW how she will respond. The only way to find out, unless you have the observational deductive skill of Sherlock Holmes, is to talk to her. Then you'll know for sure. Until then it's just baseless speculation.
6. Magnification (Catastrophizing) or Minimization: You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or the other fellow’s imperfections). This is also called the “binocular trick.”
6. You brood over the fact that your penis is half an inch smaller than "average" and forget the fact that your IQ is 150% higher than average, the last five people you met told you that you were interesting to hang out with, and you got an 8 on amihotornot.com. You give the former thought ten minutes of attention for every one minute you give the latter thought.
7. Emotional Reasoning: You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.”
7. You feel scared when in the presence of a gorgeous woman. Therefore you assume that she is in fact dangerous to you. Rationally speaking, there is nothing she can do to hurt you. Just because you're scared does not mean you are in danger. If she has a gun and has an insane hatred for people with your name, well, that's dangerous.... her being gorgeous? Not dangerous.
8. Should Statements: “You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and shouldn’ts, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. “Musts” and “oughts” are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.
8. You start thinking "I should really get this woman problem of mine solved", and when you sit on your butt instead of going out, you feel guilty before yourself, forgetting that, well, it's fun to sit on your butt. Before long, the whole woman area of life has become an intolerable burden to you, more like US Army basic training than a fun, and OPTIONAL, human pleasure. Every time you fail to approach a woman you reproach yourself. But in truth, the LESS seriously you approach the matter, the better you do, and the MORE seriously you approach the matter, the more liable you are to become a wound-up alt.seduction.fast kind of weirdo, someone who has more fun seducing a woman than being with her.
9. Labeling and Mislabeling: This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: “I’m a loser.” When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him: “He’s a goddam louse.” Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded.
9. A girl rejects you and you think "I'm a loser". You don't realize that there is no actual absolute definition of the word "loser", that in any case everybody loses sometime, and that there is almost certainly nobody in the world who has never been turned down by a woman except people who never approached a woman.
10. Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.
10. You're with a girl and say something that pisses her off. You blame yourself viciously for pissing her off instead of just accepting that she is the kind of person who is offended by that kind of remark, and neither you nor her is to blame for your difference of temperament. You start to think how screwy you are instead of the more accurate thought, "If this is how she reacts to what I said, she may not actually be fun to be with."
Hope it helps,
Good luck,
Hippocrates