10 cognitive distortions: from black-and-white thinking to catastrophizing
CareOps editorial team · · 6 min read
Mental wellness information and service guidance published by CareOps.
Translated from our Korean guide. Korean public services, insurance, and helpline numbers refer to South Korea. For urgent help elsewhere, contact local emergency services or a crisis line in your country.
Have you ever decided a friend was angry with you just because they replied late? Or stumbled once in a presentation and spent the day thinking "I'm hopeless"? Habits of thought that tilt away from the facts like this are called cognitive distortions.
At a glance
- Cognitive distortions are habits of thought that make situations look more extreme or more negative than they are. Everyone has them; they shake your mood when they repeat often and strongly.
- Common types include all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, mental filter, disqualifying the positive, jumping to conclusions, catastrophizing, emotional reasoning, should statements, labeling, and personalization.
- The basic way to change them is a thought record: write down the situation, thought, and feeling, look at the evidence for and against the thought side by side, then find a more balanced one.
What are cognitive distortions?
Cognitive distortions are habits of thought that lead you to interpret reality as more extreme or more negative than it is. In the 1960s, psychiatrist Aaron Beck described how similar distortions kept recurring in the thinking of people with depression, which became the starting point of cognitive therapy (today's cognitive behavioral therapy). David Burns later grouped them into ten in *Feeling Good*, which made them widely known.
Cognitive distortions show up mixed into automatic thoughts, the thoughts that flash through your mind on their own when something happens. Because they're so fast they feel like facts, so it's easy to miss that they're pulling your mood down. Everyone has them; the problem is when the same distortion repeats often and strongly.
What are the 10 types of cognitive distortions?
| Type | What it means | Example |
|---|---|---|
| All-or-nothing thinking | If it isn't perfect, it's a failure | "I got one question wrong, so I failed the test." |
| Overgeneralization | Turning one event into "always" or "never" | "I got turned down again. It's always like this." |
| Mental filter | Holding on to the one bad thing | Replaying one criticism all day instead of ten compliments |
| Disqualifying the positive | Writing off good things as luck | "I only did well because it was easy." |
| Jumping to conclusions | Deciding what others think (mind reading) or what will happen (fortune telling) without evidence | "No reply yet. They must be disappointed in me." |
| Catastrophizing (magnification and minimization) | Blowing small things up to the worst case and shrinking your strengths | "I'm going to get fired over this mistake." |
| Emotional reasoning | Treating a feeling as proof | "I feel anxious, so something must be going wrong." |
| Should statements | Pushing yourself or others with "should" and "must not" | "I must never make a mistake." |
| Labeling | Putting a label on a whole person after one action | "I'm a failure." |
| Personalization | Taking responsibility for things that aren't your fault | "The team's bad result is all my fault." |
You don't need to memorize the list. Writing down a thought from a hard moment and checking "which of these is it closest to?" is enough to put a little distance between you and the thought.
How do you handle all-or-nothing thinking and catastrophizing?
These are two of the most common. For all-or-nothing thinking, practice finding the shades of gray between 0 and 100. Instead of "it was a total disaster," ask, "out of 100, how many points was today's presentation?"
For catastrophizing, write three outcomes side by side: the worst case, the best case, and the most likely case. In your head only the worst case looms large, but putting all three together brings the most likely one into view.
How do you change cognitive distortions?
The method used most in cognitive behavioral therapy is the thought record. It isn't about forcing yourself to think positively; it's about checking how well the first thought fits the facts and finding a more balanced explanation.
- Situation: write only the facts: when, where, and what happened.
- Thought: write the thought that flashed through your mind, as it was.
- Feeling: name the feeling and rate how strong it was from 0 to 100.
- Evidence for: write the facts that suggest the thought is true.
- Evidence against: write the facts that don't fit the thought, too.
- Another view: looking at both, write a more balanced thought in your own words, then rate the feeling again.
When you get stuck, questions like these help: "What would I tell a friend in the same situation?", "Is this thought true every single time?", "Will this matter as much a year from now?" Thought records and the evidence for cognitive behavioral therapy are covered in more detail in What is cognitive behavioral therapy?.
When to get support from a professional
If the same thought stays with you all day and shakes your daily life, or you feel like hurting yourself, reach out directly to a psychiatrist or a counseling center. Diagnosis and medication are decided in clinical care, and you can keep up practices like this while you are in treatment or counseling.
Can you practice with cognitive distortions in an app?
CareOps Maeumi is an AI counseling app. When your conversations work with cognitive behavioral therapy, you fill in the six steps above (situation, thought, feeling, evidence for, evidence against, another view) together inside the conversation, one at a time. You find the other view in your own words by following Maeumi's questions. If circling thoughts are the harder part, see When you think too much as well.
Frequently asked questions
- Are cognitive distortions the same as cognitive biases?
- They're similar but used in different places. Cognitive bias broadly refers to common tilts in how people make judgments, while cognitive distortion is mostly used in counseling and cognitive behavioral therapy for habits of thought that make your mood harder.
- What is the black-and-white thinking fallacy?
- It's seeing the world in only two boxes, such as "perfect or a failure" or "good person or bad person." Because it leaves no middle ground, even a small mistake can feel like you ruined everything. Re-rating things on a scale from 0 to 100 helps.
- What does catastrophizing mean?
- It means blowing a small event up into one that leads to the worst possible outcome. Writing the worst, best, and most likely outcomes side by side helps you find balance.
- Can cognitive distortions be changed?
- They're habits of thought, so practice can change them. Regularly writing your thoughts down and checking the evidence, as in a thought record, helps the thoughts that come up in the same situations gradually find balance. If it's hard alone, you can practice together at a counseling center or with a psychiatrist who offers cognitive behavioral therapy.
Sources
- Beck (1963), Thinking and Depression: I. Idiosyncratic Content and Cognitive Distortions, Archives of General Psychiatry 9(4), 324–333
- David D. Burns, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy (author's book page)
- Hofmann et al. (2012), The Efficacy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: A Review of Meta-analyses, Cognitive Therapy and Research
This article shares general mental wellness information. For urgent help, contact local emergency services or a crisis line in your country. In South Korea, the suicide prevention helpline is 109 (24 hours), and the mental health crisis line is 1577-0199.