- 10 negative thoughts of anxiety and depression
- 1-Polarized thinking
- 2-Overgeneralization
- 3-Interpretation of thought
- 4-catastrophic vision
- 5-Fallacies of control
- 6-Guilt
- 7-I should
- 8-Emotional reasoning
- 9-Fallacy of change
When negative thoughts are recurrent they can negatively affect your life, cause anxiety, stress, depression and generally worsen your quality of life. Everything worries you, your heart beats at a thousand per hour, you have a feeling of suffocation, intrusive thoughts appear, you think something bad is going to happen to you…
These negative thoughts of anxiety have the ability to make a mountain out of a grain of sand, an avalanche of a few snowflakes, and all thanks to our ability to imagine and anticipate negative events that are unlikely to occur.
And if they happen, it will surely not be half as bad as you thought. Just as we are what we eat, we are what we think and depending on our thoughts, our state of mind will be, our ability to face the different setbacks that we are encountering in our lives.
Throughout my career as a psychologist, I have treated numerous patients with anxiety problems and all, in some way or another, showed that this anxiety was the result of excessive worry about the future, which in turn was maintained by different negative thoughts.
This way of thinking gives rise to erroneous beliefs about the world around you and leads you to have what is called "cognitive bias" which is a tendency to misinterpret what we perceive.
This leads to a distortion of reality, an inaccurate judgment that leads us to have a wrong interpretation of reality.
10 negative thoughts of anxiety and depression
I have compiled the 10 negative thoughts that I consider to be the ones that most manifest themselves in anxiety, with which they constantly have to deal with and with which you are going to feel identified in some way.
1-Polarized thinking
The person thinks that things have to be either very good or very terrible, what I call the gray scale is not contemplated.
The person is inflexible to think that there can be very good, good, normal, a little bad things, etc.
This person thinks that he is perfect (perfection does not exist, each of us builds it) or is a failure, which means a constant imbalance, a struggle between highs and lows.
2-Overgeneralization
The person draws a general conclusion from a simple incident or an unpleasant situation.
For example, if you go to a job interview and you are not chosen, you think you will never find a job.
The most used words in these cases are: never, nobody, always, none, everything…
3-Interpretation of thought
This thought is one of the most that I like and that I usually find a lot in consultation. We play at being seers, we think we have the ability to guess the thoughts of others and we make this an art.
This supposed ability turns against you, the more elaborate and sophisticated it is, the more it will transport you down the path of anxiety.
Without a word, even without knowing the other person, you are able to know what they think, what others are going to do and why they behave as they do.
All this with a supposed certainty that you do not question, here is the irrational.
4-catastrophic vision
This is a classic when it is over-activated by anxiety and contributes to remain over-activated, since there is a false belief that if we relax, that supposed catastrophe that we imagine can happen to us.
Here worry is used, with all the anxiety it entails, as a coping strategy. The person interprets what she hears around her as negative and you begin to tell yourself phrases that begin with: and if ……….do not be that….you are constantly anticipating a supposed tragedy.
5-Fallacies of control
This is a thought of feeling externally controlled, seeing yourself as helpless, as a victim of destiny.
This fallacy of internal control makes the person responsible for the suffering or happiness of those around him.
6-Guilt
Guilt is the most damaging thought of all and anchors us in the past.
A past that cannot be changed and that in the struggle to think that it can be changed, the verb appears: "if there were or were", which only triggered more anxiety.
He is often blamed for the problems of others and charges them as his own.
7-I should
It is the typical thinking of a rigid person, in general, these people tend to have a self-imposed list of rigid rules about how they and others should act.
If people around her violate these rules, they make her angry and also feel guilty if she violates them herself.
8-Emotional reasoning
This thought is a bias with which it is believed that what you feel would have to be true automatically.
If a person feels that a thing is stupid and boring, he automatically attributes it to himself as stupid and boring.
9-Fallacy of change
Here the person, who is usually a believer in a divine force, hopes to one day collect all the sacrifice and self-denial, as if there were someone to keep the accounts.
It affects him a lot that this supposed reward does not come, an example is: "with everything I worry about others and God does not help me."
All these thoughts experienced with a certain degree of realism contribute to produce and above all to maintain the unpleasant anxiety.
If you know these thoughts and identify them, you will be able to make them conscious and therefore realize how much they affect you on a day-to-day basis.
And you? Do you identify with any one in particular? If you see that you have identified it and you have questions about it, I will be happy to help you and solve any doubts that arise.