by Robert Duff
How do you begin to start recognizing your personal schemas and self-sabotaging thought patterns? Step 1 is to document. I will give you some ideas here, but please don’t take these as absolute musts. The key is to do something that works for you and fits with your personality, lifestyle, interests, etc. The point of documenting is to record your thoughts, reactions, and assumptions so that you can start to look at them from a more detached perspective. You might find that the process of tracking and recording these things is like a sort of self-feedback. You don’t always realize how you are changing, but simply paying more attention to your patterns and seeing them from a different perspective often leads to improvements. It helps to build your innate sense of what is helpful and what is not, so that you can start to make slight adjustments here and there that combine to make a real difference in your overall mental well-being.
We talked about a great way to identify maladaptive thought patterns in “F**K Anxiety”, which is the ABC thought log. I don’t want to just repeat myself here, though, so check out the “The Triforce” chapter in that book to learn that technique. A really simple way to get started is making a basic two column chart. One column says “immediate thought” and the other says “reasonable response.” This is probably as basic as it gets. Simply write down the immediate thought that you had. In the example that I presented above, it would be something like “She thinks I’m a huge nerd.” On the other side, you would put in a more reasonable response. Again, I don’t want you to be a rosy optimist. You don’t have to be succinct on this side. Brainstorm a bit. You might write “I don’t know for certain how she felt. She said ‘aww’, which usually implies that someone likes something. It actually pisses me off when people pretend like girl gamers don’t exist, so maybe she could totally relate. I did not give her the chance to communicate whether she liked what I was saying or whether she was embarrassed to be with me.”
When you record your thoughts, you usually need to start by logging them at the end of the day or after you are finished with whatever event you have going on. It can be a little difficult to remember everything accurately (especially with your shit-colored glasses), but that is okay. You don’t have to get everything “right.” Just go over the situations that caused you distress or stuck with you. Write down what you immediately thought or assumed in the situation, and then make yourself a cup of tea and start trying to poke some holes in your brain’s asshole logic. The important thing here is to be consistent and do this process as often as you can, especially when you are first getting started. You might even want to do this every night. Eventually, you can begin to log and document during your day on the sly. When you have a lunch break, when you get into your car before driving back home, or even in the moment on a little post it note. The trick is to start migrating your awareness of your cognitive errors and negative schemas closer and closer to the actual event. Over time, you will start to internalize this process and do it in your head automatically, so you don’t have to write it down. Then, when you start to achieve a bit of mastery over it, you can apply it in the moment and avoid falling into the same traps that you used to.
The reason I said to do something that works for your particular personality and lifestyle earlier is that there are many different creative ways that you can apply these old, fundamental self-help techniques. For some people, having a nice leather bound journal that they can keep next to their bed works best. One creative solution that has worked really well for me is using the voice memo function on my phone. When I am driving on the way back from something and I really need to externalize some of my thoughts, I will pop in my headphones and talk out loud to my phone. To be clear, I only do this when I am driving alone. I’m not that weird. There are a couple cool things about logging your thoughts this way. First off, when you have your headphones or ear piece in, it just looks like you are talking on speakerphone, so no one will give you strange glances as they drive by. The other cool thing is that when you get home, you can listen to your own analysis. There is actually some scientific validity to the idea that hearing yourself reason out loud can be very helpful. When you take in information through different mediums, be it written, auditory, or visual, you are giving yourself another avenue to process it. Hearing yourself speak out loud about the ways you are screwing yourself over can allow you to have a more objective perspective and internalize your own voice of reason. Pretty awesome stuff.
There is no limit to the amount of creative ways that you can log your thoughts, reactions, and assumptions. You can blog or vlog about them. You can make visual art. You can write fiction where a person goes through a similar situation, but handles it better. You can create music about them. You can write a rap verse about them. Do something that works for you. If this preference shifts over time that is fine. Just roll with it. What I want you to do is start paying closer attention by recording your thoughts right now, so that you can start reaping the benefits that this perspective provides.
When you have practiced the process of noticing where your assumptions and beliefs go off the rails, you can catch yourself in the moment. Some people can even learn to practice something called cognitive rehearsal. When I was working with people struggling with substance abuse, we would call this “playing the tape through”. That means playing the mental video about what might occur and how you might react. This helps you to anticipate roadblocks that may pop up and how you can work to overcome them. You certainly don’t have to predict every possible scenario. That is impossible. Instead, you imagine what might happen, notice some of the cognitive mistakes that you have a tendency to make, and craft a few strategies to avoid falling into the same pits of mental douchebaggery that have screwed you over time and time again.
Another effective way to combat these self-sabotaging errors of cognition is to put a name to these thought patterns. (I know I keep saying that I don’t want to repeat myself too much on topics that were covered in the previous book, but, damn it some things just deserve restating. Plus I’m probably committing my own cognitive error in assuming that you also have anxiety and decided to read that book as well. I have thrown around a few different terms to describe unhelpful ways of thinking that we sometimes fall into when we are struggling with depression (or a variety of other issues). The classical literature on depression calls these cognitive distortions. They are usually ways of thinking that are not quite reasonable or are overextensions of reasonable thinking. The interesting thing about them is that the ones that rear their ugly heads and lead to depression are actually pretty consistent. Have a look at these and think about whether any of them hit the mark.
Filtering: We pretty much covered this one at the beginning of the chapter. This is where you wear those shit-colored glasses and selectively filter out most of the positive aspects about any given situation.
Example: Say you decided to finally get off your ass and try to take more proactive steps toward fighting against laziness and lethargy by volunteering at a charitable event near you. Objectively, the event was a huge success. The organization made a great deal of money, and the event actually seemed to educate people about a cause that you really care about. However, due to your mental filter, the whole experience felt like a failure to you. You hit traffic on your way there and showed up 15 minutes late. You also feel like you played such a small part that you didn’t even need to be there. Seems pretty useless. That is the filtering distortion talking. Taking a step back, there are definitely some alternative points of view that you could try out. Even though being late is not what you intended, shit happens. No one even noticed that you were late, and the event organizers intentionally put in plenty of “buffer” time for people to arrive before the event started. You may feel like you were such a small and insignificant part of this event, but what would happen if every person with a relatively minor part to play decided to not show up? There would be no event. When you are stuck in filtering mode, it definitely takes some effort to try and see the positive possib
ilities that you have filtered out.
Overgeneralization: This is one of the more sneaky cognitive distortions, because it does come from a place of logic and reason. However, it takes the lessons that your big human brain has learned from trial and error and overextends them. Our brains are amazing, but they are also kinda lazy. They like to make shortcuts and it is way easier to apply a single rule to everything instead of taking the energy to determine whether a rule applies to each particular circumstance.
Example: A lot of you reading this are probably students. Maybe you have had a teacher or professor that you really did not get along with. For whatever reason you just butted heads and it felt like they were out to get you all year. Believe me, I can relate to this one. During those times of extreme frustration, I took my feelings of anger and sadness and overextended them. I told myself that teachers don’t like me. Being an adolescent male, that soon turned into “teachers suck and I don’t like them because they don’t like me.” I’m not a naturally depressive person, so for me this turned into acting out and misbehaving. For someone who does have a tendency toward depression, they might instead turn these feelings inward and take a serious hit to their self-concept. You might wonder what the hell is wrong with you that teachers would hate you so much more than other students. Man, I guess you really just aren’t good at school. Of course you don’t actually suck at school and not all teachers hate you. In reality, you just have gotten one that you really do not jive well with. Maybe it’s something specific about your personal differences, or maybe they are just an asshole. Some teachers are just assholes. Overgeneralization tends to bypass all of this logic, though. It just tells you that you might as well assume that the rule will be true for all similar situations.
Personalization: This is a tricky one that often leads to those nasty feelings of guilt. Basically you hold yourself personally accountable for things that you may not have even played a part in. You have gotten so used to things being your fault, it’s almost like your default mode now.
Example: For those parents out there, you may have had a situation where your child is acting or performing poorly in school. This is a very easy one to personalize, especially if you have a depressive streak. The depressed brain is going to immediately jump to self-blame, and you will start taking guesses at what you did or didn’t do that might have influenced your kiddo’s behavior. In reality, there are a lot of factors that could be at play. Maybe there is something social going on like bullying or even something positive like a new romantic interest that has made your child’s attention much more divided. It is completely possible that you have had some influence on the situation, but it isn’t reasonable to automatically assume that the whole deal is your fault.
Fallacy of Control: The fallacy of control takes both external and internal forms. For external, you feel that there are many things that are outside of your control that affect your life and emotional state. Things keep happening to you and it’s so annoying that you can’t do anything about it! The fallacy of internal control is very much like the personalization that we talked about above. You assume that you somehow have control over the way other people act or feel.
Example: Your boss at work is a jerk. He keeps pushing you harder and harder to make ridiculous deadlines and changing the things that you are responsible for. On top of that, you can’t catch a break with traffic. And now it’s raining. UGH why does this stuff keep happening to me? Why won’t the universe just let me be happy (external)? Oh, and now the boss is being an asshole again. Wonder what I did this time (internal)?
Emotional Reasoning: In this one, things get a little twisted. It’s probably one of the most common distortions of thinking that happens with or without depression. Instead of having a situation lead to you feeling a certain way, the emotion comes first and colors your perception of what is going on. Basically you assume that since you feel a certain way, it must be true, regardless of what the objective evidence says.
Example: You don’t know exactly why, but you wake up feeling like nobody is on your side and you are fighting an uphill battle to please anyone. This causes you to be pretty jumpy and on guard throughout the day. You start to see everything that your friends and family do as an expression of them being tired of you and eventually convince yourself that it’s true. So, naturally, they start to notice that something is a bit off and ask you what’s wrong. Since you assume that your internal feelings are correct and that they don’t actually care, you just respond with a brusque and unconvincing “I’m fine.” This naturally leads them to assume that you just want to be left alone, and then when they give you space, you take it as more evidence that they were sick of you in the first place. Another vicious cycle.
Labeling: You apply a global label to things instead of thinking about them on a case by case basis. Instead of saying that you fucked up a particular situation this one time, you label yourself as a fuck up and take on the emotional hit to the groin that comes along with that label.
Example: You’re a student and you have just bombed a test. I don’t mean that you made a few little mistakes here and there, I’m talking a defcon 1 level total botch. Enough that your teacher actually asked you to talk to them after class because it seemed unusual. Well, instead of taking stock of the situation and noticing that you probably did poorly this one time because you were sick and couldn’t sleep the night before, you label yourself a bad student. Only bad students have to talk to the teacher right?
So, the thing about cognitive distortions is that we all do them sometimes. You’re a damn liar if you say otherwise. It’s not rocket science to see how these can make you feel pretty shitty. I bet some of you read through those and went, “Yep. Oh yeah, that’s me. Damn… that’s me too. Okay, this is just getting ridiculous now.” Don’t you fret. My aim is not only to point out the ways in which your brain is a douche, but also give you some strategies to overcome its douchiness. The first step is arming yourself with the knowledge of which are your personal roadblocks. My list here is certainly not an exhaustive one. I just wanted to provide you a few examples that probably apply to a good number of you. If you are interested in looking at a more extensive list of them, a simple Google search of “cognitive distortions” should do the trick.
A mentor of mine does some awesome sports psychology work. With his competitive cyclists, he describes an exercise called “mapping your monsters.” Basically, this acknowledges that they already know the course for the race they’re about to ride. They know the hills, they know the turns, and they know which portions of the race are going to give them hell, based on their past experience riding. When you map your monsters, you draw out the course and literally mark where each monster is probably going to reside. For one reason or another, simply noticing what the problems are and where they arise helps to take away some of their power to screw you over. I think bringing your own cognitive monsters out into the light also takes away some of their power. So you can start by using my list here (or any list that you find online) and highlighting the ones that most apply to you. Then you can make a little log like this:
Start off by logging each time you engage in these unhelpful thinking patterns each day. You can quickly get an idea about where you’re shooting yourself in the foot. It’s alright if this is a bit shocking to you. That’s part of the process. By writing it down in a log like this, you are again externalizing the information. You are allowing yourself to look at it from a more detached and objective perspective. This sort of feedback is already your first step toward decreasing the frequency with which you run into these mental traps. To be clear, the point here is not self-flagellation. I don’t want you to punish yourself each time you engage in a cognitive distortion. Instead, keep striving to engage in them less and use this valuable insider information to guide you on your quest.
All or nothing thinking is a pretty big problem in depression. You tell yourself that something was a failure if it did not go completely right, and that makes you f
eel really terrible. Remember how I said that I want you to be a realist instead of a rosy optimist? You can acknowledge that you have fucked up without engaging in all-or-nothing thinking. Instead of just writing the entire situation off as a fail, try rating it on a scale from 0-100. I know this might seem a little pessimistic, and many other self-help resources might tell you to avoid telling yourself that you screwed up at all. To me, that approach is really unfair. We are human and all screw up sometimes. We want to get better at realistically judging just to what extent we have screwed up and to get better at emotionally reacting in a way that is consistent with that rating instead of always reacting in an over-the-top dramatic fashion. I tend to use being late to work or class as an example of a basic mistake because it’s unfortunately an inherited disposition that my family handed down to me, and I have had to learn to not let it wreck my mood for the entire day.