Labelling dysfunctional thinking styles

  The list of dysfunctional thinking styles below is by no means an exhaustive one. However, it covers some of the most common ones which are encountered in everyday life.

Catastrophic thinking

  Catastrophic thinking is characterized by making excessively negative predictions about the future in the absence of evidence to support these predictions. It is about overestimating the chances of disaster, which is seen as being imminent and just round the corner. For example, an individual who makes a relatively minor mistake at work worries that they might lose their job … if they lose their job they will not be able to pay the mortgage … they will end up on the street … their family will leave them … they will have no job, no money, no family … end up ‘on skid row’ and so on. It can be seen that the original trigger event leads to a whole chain of disastrous predictions that are way out of proportion. While most of us make a guess at what is going to happen in the future, this is usually a balance of positive and negative predictions. However, catastrophic thinking is a kind of fortune telling which predicts only bad things happening.

Jumping to conclusions and mind reading

  These are specific manifestations of catastrophic thinking. Jumping to conclusions involves making negative predictions (fortune telling) about the future such as ‘I know I’ll make a mess of things’ or ‘I know this treatment won’t work’. When an individual mind reads, they imagine that they know what people are thinking instead of finding out what they are really thinking. Both jumping to conclusions and mind reading involve making predictions in the absence of evidence to support them and rarely result in successful outcomes. People are notoriously bad at making such predictions.

Overgeneralization

  Overgeneralization involves using one small part of an experience or situation to describe a whole experience. Conclusions are drawn on the basis of this very limited information and applied across a broad range of situations. One small bit is used to describe the whole. For example, someone who slightly overcooks the vegetables proclaims that ‘the whole meal is ruined’. A single isolated failure is interpreted as part of a never-ending pattern of defeat. It is often accompanied by overgeneralizing statements such as ‘never’ or ‘always’, for example, ‘I never have any success’ or ‘I always upset people’.

Magnification

  Magnification refers to the tendency to exaggerate the importance of negative events and blowing them out of proportion. It involves focusing one’s thinking on and attending only to the negative parts of one’s life, while ignoring all the positive things that happen. The person thinks that the mistakes that they have made are more important and significant than they actually are: they selectively attend to one negative aspect or detail while dismissing the broader context. For example, an individual who makes a single bad business deal spends a disproportionate amount of time ‘beating himself up’ about it rather than focusing on all the other deals that have been successful. Other examples include ‘I got question nine wrong’ without reference to the fact that they got all the other questions right, or ‘Last Tuesday evening was awful’, without acknowledging that the other six days of last week were enjoyable.