Treatment for most exterior wounds is typically not too complicated. When you cut your finger, for instance, you can use antibacterial cream and a bandage, and the wound will eventually heal. You’re basically good to go. Taking care of your thought processes isn’t as simple or straightforward. Especially if they are the result of general anxiety disorder, depression, or another mental illness. When you don’t fully understand what’s driving negative thought patterns, it’s like having a paper cut that keeps coming back. Or perhaps you don’t even notice the cut until it starts to hurt.

Our daily thinking count is thought to range from 25,000 to 50,000. Imagine the hundreds upon thousands of negative thoughts you are producing each day if your frame of mind is primarily negative. With depression, that is precisely the situation. Depression is characterized by negative thinking, among other things. The depression is basically speaking through bad thought. That is how depression sounds. In reality, depression first shows up as bad thoughts before it causes unpleasant effects. To learn more about the common negative thought patterns in depression, seek Online counselling at TalktoAngel.

Mental Health and Cognitive Distortions

Although mental illnesses like melancholy and anxiety might occasionally cause a person to think negatively on a regular basis, depression is frequently the result of cognitive errors.

When negative things occur, we start to criticize ourselves, telling ourselves things like “I’m no good,” “I’m a complete failure,” or “Nothing ever goes my way.” Because our feelings follow our thoughts, it stands to reason that unfavorable thoughts like these could eventually lead to depressive symptoms.

Cognitive therapy, a form of psychotherapy created by psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck in the 1960s, is based on this idea. If we repeat a thought enough times, we start to believe it to be true, and then our emotions start to reflect what we are thinking about ourselves.

Causes of negative thought patterns

There are various explanations for why people sometimes seem to be too concerned with life’s bad parts. Conflict and strife are frequently exalted in our culture and media. Our urge to battle and survive is the foundation of our evolutionary makeup. Even recent human history is largely a story of dread and violence. Perhaps it is not surprising that we might become so fixated on the bad things going on around us.

What is the primary reason behind pessimistic thinking? Since negative thinking results from a complicated network of dynamic elements, there is no single primary cause that we can identify. Depending on the individual engaging in the negative thinking, their unique background, their triggers, and their present mental health state, the main cause of a negative thought pattern will differ substantially.

Cognitive distortions frequently result from poor methods of handling stressful situations. These ways of thinking might occasionally be helpful when we are dealing with a challenging situation. When used temporarily, they may lower stress levels or defend self-esteem.

However, employing these distortions too frequently can be harmful. These thought patterns can harm mental health and increase emotions of worry and despair because they are frequently negative in character. Additionally, when we revert to old habits of thinking, they stop us from learning better coping mechanisms.

Common cognitive distortions

• The All-or-Nothing thinking

Black-and-white or polarized thinking, also referred to as all-or-nothing thinking, is the process of viewing everything in terms of two diametrically opposed extremes. Absolute words like always, never, and forever are used to describe this way of thinking. There are no grey areas; everything is either this or that, amazing or dreadful.

• Overgeneralization

Overgeneralization is a form of cognitive distortion that entails extrapolating from one scenario to all future ones. When someone makes an arbitrary assumption about the entire population, they are over generalizing. 2 People tend to over generalize and believe that events will unfold in the same way, rather than taking all the possible outcomes into account or concentrating on how this scenario differs from the past.

• Emotional reasoning

When we maintain that something is factually accurate despite the fact that our only support comes from our emotions. It is challenging to have a constructive conversation with someone who is emotionally reasoning since they focus more on their bad feelings than on logic. The emotional reason begins with the assumption that the problem must exist since their bad feelings are there, and then they create a fake narrative to prove that.

• Labeling

It is putting a bad interpretation on our surroundings people, or on ourselves. Labels like “idiot,” “bad person,” “lousy father,” “typical man” or “typical woman” are frequently used. These labels serve as a form of self-restriction that prevents us from expanding.

• Forecasting and fortune telling

When you forecast events repeatedly, it will never go well. When we project our pessimism onto the future, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy where our inability to act in a way that would produce positive results is the result.

If you or your partner is facing depression issues, feel free to seek Relationship Counselling at TalktoAngel.