12 kinds of thoughts that can easily cause depression | change cognition

 

In the course of human life, due to the mutual influence of various factors such as social environment, self-psychology, and biological genetics, the functions of the brain's organs lose their healthy balance, physical discomfort, emotional depression, and depression.

Many people will find that depression patients usually show a state of low mood, and they think that helping him adjust his mood can change his negative state. Some family members will take him to some happy places and lively atmosphere, but most of the time All in vain.

In fact, for patients with depression, poor thinking, or cognitive impairment, is the main source of depression. From a psychological point of view, what are the main ways of thinking that are likely to cause depression? What about depression?

01. Self-denial

The first mode of thinking is called self-denial. Depressed people are good at denying their own positive emotions and positive behaviors; on the contrary, they are particularly "tolerant" to their negative emotions and negative behaviors.

They subconsciously allow their negative emotions to grow, even though they do not like them.

If a boy confessed to a girl, she would think, how can a girl who is so unsightly like herself have happiness? Certainly this relationship cannot last. And when the boy finally left her, she would smile bitterly, look, I said earlier that I can't have happiness.

She will subconsciously deny her positive emotions, but is very relaxed about negative emotions. When she wanted to get out of this state, she would subconsciously deny her active efforts and behavior.

For example: When she runs for a day or two, and interrupts for some reason, she will say that she has no perseverance, and it seems she is destined to be like this for a lifetime. Even if she persisted for a long, long time, she would think that her hard work for so long was in vain, and she still didn't keep going.

In other words, people who are depressed will subconsciously be good at cultivating their own sense of frustration and hitting their sense of accomplishment.

Therefore, if you want to completely get out of depression, you must completely rebuild your thinking mode.

02. Guilty

This bad perception is the mother of guilt. The specific manifestation is: any negative event that occurs in your life, even though it has nothing to do with you, you will arbitrarily think that the reason why it happened is your fault, or it proves your incompetence.

Example: Your boyfriend is sick today, you will directly think: I am not good, I did not take good care of him, I am not a competent girlfriend, so I feel guilty.

Putting blame on yourself will make you feel extremely guilty, and your strong sense of responsibility will force you to bear the whole world and make you breathless.

You confuse the concepts of "influencing others" and "controlling others".

You need to realize that no matter what your identity is, you will influence others to a certain extent.

But in the end, what other people like to do is his business, you can't control it, can you?

03. One or the other

The worst effect caused by this bad way is that when you look at people or things, you have a tendency to absolute.

For example: if you fail in an exam, you will think, I am a failure, I am a waste. But in fact, you just failed the exam one time. No one will succeed in the exam for the rest of your life, and you will get 100 points each time.

Therefore, this either-or thinking is essentially a manifestation of perfectionism. It will make you afraid of any mistakes or imperfections.

And this way of thinking is unrealistic, because there are very few extreme polarities in life. No one is absolutely smart or stupid, and no one is absolutely beautiful or ugly.

There are not only black and white, but also gray areas in life.

04. Partial generalization

This way of thinking makes you arbitrarily think: if something happened to you once, it will happen repeatedly, leading to the worst results.

This kind of deviant way of thinking in life may have been experienced by everyone, but if you consider most of the events in this respect, then it will have a great impact on your life.

For example, a 26-year-old boy asked me to consult because of a relationship problem: He said: I like this girl, and I had the courage to ask her out last time, but unfortunately, she said that she had something to do that day, so she refused me.

Therefore, the boy’s thinking mode is: I am a normal person, and I am not a rich second generation. I will never find a girlfriend like this. No one wants to date me. I will definitely be a single dog in my life. Up.

It is not difficult to see that the boy's way of thinking is: He concluded that this girl would refuse her once, and that she would always reject herself in the future, and that all girls would never date herself.

Therefore, from this perspective, he came to a final conclusion, that is: I will never get married for the rest of my life.

But in fact, during the consultation process, we found that the girl only rejected him once, and there was indeed something to be dealt with that day, and the boy only asked her once.

He was not defeated by fate, but he was defeated in the end by his partial and wrong way of thinking.

05. Selective filtering

There has been such an experiment in psychology. When two faces are presented to patients with depression at the same time, one is joyful and the other is fear and sadness. The first thing that a depressed patient notices is the sad face, and seldom pays attention to the happy face, even the neutral face.

Generally speaking, patients with depression will have such a psychological processing tendency: they will spend more time paying attention to negative emotions or events in life, and will often recall some unpleasant and bad things.

This way of thinking will allow you to pick out negative information from any situation in your life, repeat it, and then you will feel that the world is negative.

So, when you are depressed, you are like wearing a pair of tinted glasses, which will filter out any positive content. And you yourself are not aware of this "filtering process", so you will feel that everything is negative, which will make you experience unnecessary pain.

06. Disastrous

The biggest feature of this way of thinking is "zoom in" and "zoom out". How do you say?

Specifically, you will habitually enlarge or reduce certain facts too much.

Interestingly, you tend to amplify your own emotions of error, imperfection, or fear, and exaggerate their importance and disastrous consequences.

For example: if you make a mistake in some of the content that was originally prepared at a certain meeting, your catastrophic thinking mode will naturally appear in your mind: God, I actually made such a mistake, it is terrible , Everyone in the company will know immediately, my reputation is ruined!

Therefore, you are looking at your mistake with a magnifying glass. In this way, the mistake becomes very huge, and you have successfully transformed an ordinary negative event into a catastrophic event.

But in fact, other colleagues may not know what you said wrong, and even if they do, will they really treat you differently because of this small mistake? impossible!

Similarly, for your own advantages, you will use the zoom lens to see. You will ignore your strengths and make them very small and insignificant.

Through this catastrophic way of thinking, you succeeded in making yourself more and more inferior.

07. Attribution bias

This kind of attribution bias, in summary, is: external attribution for positive events and internal attribution for negative events.

This is a more outrageous psychological illusion. It is clear that something is developing in a good direction, or there are some neutral signals. People with this mode of thinking will often attribute or interpret them as dangerous precursors. Convert these positive experiences into negative experiences.

Some people have a tendency to blame themselves, thinking that good things are done by others, and bad things are done by themselves.

Most people with mental health tend to attribute positive events internally and externally attribute negative events.

For example: When you are praised by others for something, this way of thinking will tell you: This is just their outward politeness and has nothing to do with me.

There are also some girls, if others express that they like her, she will say: These people don't know me, I am actually a very bad woman, and no one really likes me.

Therefore, people with this way of thinking can turn happiness into troubles and transform positive experiences into negative experiences in a short period of time.

However, you may not know what you are doing.

08. Random labeling

Labeling yourself means using mistakes to establish a completely negative self-image.

It is an extreme form of partial generalization, and the idea behind it is "when measuring a person, we must use his mistakes as the yardstick."

Just describe your mistake with a sentence that starts with "I am a..." and you are probably labeling yourself.

For example: You lose because of investing in stocks. At this time, you are likely to label yourself and say: I am a fool, I am a useless person. But the fact is that the stock market has gone up and down, and you only make occasional misjudgments. So, you just made a mistake.

Labeling yourself is not only annoying, but also ridiculous and stupid. Because, please remember: your ego cannot be equal to any one thing you do.

In addition, labeling indiscriminately will make you use inaccurate words when describing things, and it will be too emotional.

For example: When you face the temptation of a box of ice cream, but want to lose weight, you will think like this: I hate myself to death, I am really a pig.

This kind of thinking will make you very upset, and the most likely thing is that you will be emotional and just sweep away all the ice cream.

09. Emotional Reasoning

This way of thinking is: You use emotions as a basis for facts.

Every time the mood is low, almost emotional reasoning is at work.

In your opinion, the facts are so unsuccessful, so the actual situation must be like this. You never even thought of questioning whether the assumptions that led to your feelings are correct.

This kind of reasoning is misleading, because your feelings reflect only your thoughts and beliefs. If they are distorted, then your emotions will lose their correctness.

For example: I feel guilty, then I must have done something wrong; I feel very broken, then my problem must be unsolvable; I am not in the mood to do anything, so I might as well lie on the sofa in a daze; I feel inferior, Then I must be a useless person.

A common consequence of emotional reasoning is procrastination.

The house’s hygiene has not been cleaned for a week because you told yourself: I’m so tired of thinking about these messy housework. It seems that it’s hard to clean up, so it’s better not to do it, and wait for it later. Right.

But in fact, the sanitation work at home is not as bad as you think. You have been deceiving yourself. This is because you are used to letting negative feelings guide your behavior.

10. Self-judgment

You always unconsciously make some good and bad, good and bad evaluations of yourself, others and things, instead of simply describing, accepting and understanding.

This way of thinking is mainly manifested in: You often judge things arbitrarily and always feel that they are not perfect.

For example: How good his basketball is, and I, even after playing for a semester, are still inferior to him; look at how successful he is and join the company at the same time as me. He has become the head of the department, but I have achieved nothing.

When we compare ourselves with others or other things, our self-confidence and self-esteem are often hurt the most.

You know, this world is not perfect, and none of us can be perfect.

However, a person with this kind of thinking mode has always been demanding beauty and self-pressurization, which will become an important factor leading to his depression.

11. Jump to conclusions

In the absence of empirical investigations, they quickly and arbitrarily come to negative conclusions.

There are two ways of thinking like this: mind reading and prophetic mistakes.

What is mind reading?

To put it simply, it is subjective conjecture, speculating on other people's ideas, and negating them.

For example: when you eat with your partner after get off work, but she is unhappy, you will have this kind of automatic thinking: She is angry with me, did I do something wrong?

But in fact, if you are willing to ask her one more sentence, you will know that she just made some unpleasant things with her colleagues in the company today.

This self-seeking behavior pattern will form a self-fulfilling prophecy, causing our interpersonal relationship to appear in a state of disharmony. Although nothing happened at the beginning.

The prophet is wrong, a bit like an unknown prophet. And what you predict must be your unfortunate content, not a moment of good luck.

This mode of thinking makes you think that something bad will happen and makes you believe it.

For example, when you are sick, you will think: I am dying, and I will definitely not be able to cure it. This kind of self-prediction about the recovery situation is so negative that it makes you desperate.

If you combine the above two ways of thinking about jumping to conclusions, give an example:

Suppose you call a friend of yours, but no one answers. You waited for a long time, but he still didn't reply. You will think that he just doesn't want to call back and doesn't want to contact you anymore. ——The conclusion of mind reading.

Then, you will be even more angry and decide that you will never call him on the initiative again, because you will think: I call him again, he will think I am pestering him, and I can't afford to lose this person. -Negative prophecies, the prophet is wrong.

From now on you will hide from that friend in behavior and treat this as a shame.

But in fact, this friend did not receive a call from you because he was traveling abroad, and you found out that all the torture was caused by you.

12.Should the law

Regardless of whether you are facing yourself or others, you will try to use "should" sentences to spur yourself or ask others.

You always say to yourself: I should do this, I must do that.

This way of thinking will only make you feel stressed and resentful. In most cases, you will become depressed and discouraged.

Because, when your actual performance is lower than the expected standard, you use "should" or "should not" will make you feel ashamed and guilty, and hate yourself even more.

And when you impose your "should rule" on others, you will feel even more frustrated, because this kind of thinking will only make you lose control, irritable and resentful. If the moral behavior of others is lower than your expectations, you will regard yourself as the incarnation of justice and become angry.

At this time, either you lower your expectations, or you will always be worried about human behavior that does not meet your expectations, and your emotions will get worse and worse.

This way of thinking will confine you to your self-framework and established standards, and will make you live harder and harder and more tired.

These ways of thinking are all important factors that lead to our depression, low respect, and low sense of value.

The point I want to express in this article is: Cognition affects emotions and behavior.

If we can be self-aware in our lives, or help friends around us to find these biased cognitions, it may better help us improve the quality of life and stay away from depression.

Via. Wan