5 Common Thinking Traps—and How to Replace them with Healthy Thinking Habits

Wellness is an all-encompassing term. It assumes mental health in addition to physical health. Today, investing in your health doesn’t only mean to eat correctly and exercise regularly, it also means to pay attention to your thought patterns. All dimensions of wellness—fitness, nutrition, mental wellbeing, social, environmental, and emotional—are very closely linked. To be truly happy and healthy, one needs a balance of all of these.

Mental health is arguably one of the most important components to fulfilling optimal wellness. Without being in a good headspace, the other aspects of wellness are a lot harder to fulfill. Healthy thinking habits help with this. Our brains have proclivities to the negative—as most of us know. They make us worry, make us depressed, and sometimes talk us into an anxiety-fueled panic that can be hard to crawl out of.

So what’s the solution for this? If a specific mental illness is the problem (anxiety, depression, OCD, PTSD, etc. ), there are specific therapies and medications that can be given to make the illness easier to cope with. So that shouldn’t be disregarded. However, in addition to those therapies (and just in general, even for people who don’t have a mental illness), healthy thinking habits force our brains to basically play on a fair playing ground that isn’t biased towards negativity. It is not positive thinking, and this article should not be considered a “toxic positivity” kind of article. Instead, healthy thinking habits give your brain a boost in the correct direction, replacing thoughts like “No one likes me” with “Some people like me and some people don’t—and that’s okay.” To continue this article, we’ll list some of the common thinking traps people often fall victim to—and which thoughts to replace them with.

Thinking Trap #1: Mind Reading

Mind reading is an example of a type of thinking trap that tricks your brain to jump to conclusions about what others think about you, with the assumption that their thoughts/feelings are negative, without concrete evidence.

Examples:

• “I know everyone here thinks I’m weird.”
• “She hates me, I can tell.”
• “He doesn’t want to actually spend time with me—he just feels obligated to.”

This type of thinking often turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy—if you believe someone doesn’t like you, you’re more likely to act in ways in response to that. For example: if you ignore/avoid them, they’re more likely to pull away as well, which gives you more “evidence” that they dislike you, which then turns into, “I knew they didn’t like me.”

How to fix it

The first step is to understand that you can’t read people’s minds, and that humans are dynamic with ever-changing moods, that most of the time, have nothing to do with you. Second, when you find yourself assuming what someone thinks, remember to acknowledge that you have a bias, and have an imperfect set of knowledge.

Thinking Trap #2: Black and White Thinking

Black and white thinking is thinking that one of two extremes are guaranteed to happen: one good, and one bad. There is only success or failure—no middle ground.

Examples:

• You’re on a strict diet, and eat an unhealthy meal. You then think, “Well, I guess my diet is ruined! Guess I have to go back to eating unhealthy and start fresh later.”
• You get a bad performance review at work, or a bad grade on an assignment. You think, “I’m a total failure! I’m a horrible employee/bad student, and I’ll never get anywhere.”
• Thinking thoughts like, “That was a bad thing for him to do. He’s a terrible person! I’m never talking to him again.”

The problem with this is that things are very rarely black and white—most of life is lived in the muddled grey area. Life is very seldomly all-or-nothing, and having this mentality does nothing but harm your health and disrupt your relationships. It can even negatively affect your work performance (“I have to work super, super hard so my boss will consider me for a raise! Otherwise, working isn’t worth it!”). Growth happens in the grey area. Success is the result of consistent, imperfect efforts that happen over a long period of time.

How to fix it

One awesome exercise we found is training your brain by listing different realms of possibilities. The first step is recognizing when you’re engaging in black and white thinking. The next: grab a pen and a piece of paper, start a note on your phone, whatever. List every single outcome you can think of regarding the situation you’re facing. Chances are, you can come up with a lot more than two outcomes.

Writing things down is therapeutic, and allows us to think things through better than if we were to just sit there and let the thoughts float through our head, uncriticized.

Thinking Trap #3: Catastrophizing

Catastrophizing occurs when the assumption is made that the worst will happen, and that the situation is worse than it actually is, or will be worse if things don’t turn out as expected.

Examples:

• You’re anxious before a test for a class. You assume that if you fail the test, you’ll fail the class, which makes you a bad student and that you’ll never get your degree or land a job that you want. That turns into you having financial struggles in the future.
• You get into an argument with your significant other/spouse. You assume this means that your relationship is doomed to fail, and because your relationship will fail, you’ll be alone forever.

It’s easy to let your thoughts snowball into a big, huge monster that you can’t fight. There are three components to this kind of thinking: 1. Overestimating the weight that your current situation (test, fight, performance review, whatever it may be) will bear on your future. 2. Overestimating how the events will transpire afterwards. 3. Underestimating, even in the worst possible scenario that they do happen, your ability to cope under your new circumstances.

How to fix it

There are a couple of ways to deal with this one. One way to manage it is to recognize when your thinking starts to become irrational, and then choosing to think of a less-negative, or even positive scenario. Another one is to acknowledge that unpleasant things happen, and that life is a medley of both good and bad days.

Thinking Trap #4: Overgeneralizing

The overgeneralizing thinking trap is when you think that something negative will happen, or you believe something negative about yourself, a person, or a group of people.

Examples:

• “Why does this always happen to me? Life is always so unfair.”
• “He’s always doing this to me. He never cares about my feelings.”
• “I wasn’t asked for a second interview. I’ll never be asked for a second interview at any company. I’m never going to find a job.”

Overgeneralizing is dangerous because it’s inaccurate. Using blanket terms like “always,” “never,” “every,” and “none” leaves very little room for positive thought. Black-and-white terms like that very rarely describe a realistic synopsis of the situation. It also normally stems from just one or two situations.

Unfortunately, this thought pattern can be very debilitating. If you generalize that no one is ever going to want to hire you, your attitude towards looking for, interviewing for, and landing a job will already be seen through a negative lens. If your effort reflects that, it’s almost guaranteed that you won’t find a job, because you’re already predisposed to thinking that no one is going to hire you anyways, so what’s the point in trying? You can see how this thinking trap can steamroll very, very fast. Overgeneralizing often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

How to fix it

An awesome trick we found is to weigh the costs and benefits of this thought. What do you gain from thinking you won’t land a job? Chances are, nothing. What are the costs? Try to figure out if you’re losing more or gaining more from your thoughts about the situation. In addition, analyze the evidence you’re basing your predictions off of. Are you overgeneralizing because of one or two experiences, or do you have a lot of evidence? Do you think, if your mind was a courtroom, the evidence would hold up in court? Think about your feelings about the situation. Write them down. Do you think, based on the evidence you have and your feelings towards the situation, that your conclusion is logical? Or are your feelings giving your mind a negativity bias towards the situation?

Thinking Trap #5: Emotional Reasoning

One of the most common thinking traps. Emotional reasoning occurs when your emotions are taken as truth. Rather than observing reality, thinking it through, and having your emotions react accordingly, you feel a certain way, and then make deductions about your reality based on those emotions.

Examples:

• You feel like your partner might not love you or care for you. With no concrete evidence, and lots of reassurance from your partner that they love you deeply, you still  think that it’s true based on your feelings.
• You feel guilty about a situation, so you think that you must be guilty. Despite reassurance from your friends and family that you haven’t done anything wrong, you still feel like you did something wrong.
• You feel lonely, so you conclude that no one cares about you, despite having plenty of family and friends you spend your time with. You then deduce that you’re unlovable and no one likes you.

Running on our emotions to draw conclusions for us gives us distorted perceptions of reality. It can be dangerous—because we all have our own biases, self-esteem issues, and past traumas. We need to recognize that it’s entirely possible for us to feel a certain way regardless of the situation, and then proceed to project that onto the people and situations around us. Sometimes with this way of thinking, it can feel like we’re logically interpreting reality, but we’re not.

How to fix it

It can be hard, but recognizing and challenging your thoughts when you feel emotional is key to remaining grounded and realistic. For example, when you feel lonely, try switching “nobody loves me, I’m unlovable,” to “I have a strong circle of support. I am worthy of love, and am loved dearly.” You can also try to reason through your emotions, and try to analyze why you might be feeling the way you are. For example, rather than thinking that your partner is cheating on you and be constantly worried about infidelity despite no concrete evidence, think about why you feel this way. Maybe there’s a past trauma you still haven’t healed from. There could be a number of reasons why. Journaling and speaking with a mental health professional are another two tools people use to navigate their emotions and ground themselves in the present. Speaking of grounding yourself in the present—often, emotional reasoning is brought up by past traumas. Try practicing daily meditation. Meditation helps ground us in the present, focus our noisy thoughts, and calm our minds.

*While being educated about mental health is an important component to wellness, we are not therapists. If you are experiencing intense thought patterns, anxiety, depression, PTSD, or any other mental health problem, it is important to speak with a mental health professional.

Resources

• https://www.mindsethealth.com/matter/thinking-traps-cognitive-distortions
• https://www.theemotionmachine.com/mind-reading-avoid-this-common-trap-to-improve-your-communication-skills/#:~:text=miscommunication%20and%20misunderstanding.-,In%20psychology%2C%20mind%2Dreading%20is%20when%20we%20try%20to%20infer,we%20really%20don’t%20know.
• https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/black-and-white-thinking#treatment
• https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320844#six-tips-to-manage-catastrophic-thinking
• https://cogbtherapy.com/cbt-blog/cognitive-distortions-overgeneralizing
• https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/evolution-the-self/201706/what-s-emotional-reasoning-and-why-is-it-such-problem