In our last three articles we’ve discussed how anger can harm us, humor protects us, and how to develop personal disciplines to bridge divisions in our increasingly divided and often hostile world. A necessary component in each of these is being able to identify and overcome the common cognitive distortions that often lead to the anger (frustration/depression/anxiety/paranoia) that hurts, blocks our ability to find humor around us, and stands in the way of bridging division.
Stanford University psychiatrist and researcher Dr. David Burns has identified ten common thought distortions that can easily become ingrained in our way of thinking and lead to anxiety, paranoia, depression, and difficulties managing professional and personal lives. Thought distortions skew our reality, alter the way we perceive the world around us, and, if not confronted and corrected, cause lasting emotional disturbances. Awareness of their existence and a basic idea of what each one looks like is important to defending against them.
The 10 common thought distortions are:
1) All-or-Nothing/Black-and-White Thinking A very common distortion, easily observed from the outside but difficult to see in oneself, this is seeing people and situations only in absolute terms. Shades of gray are ignored or missed altogether, people and events are categorized as either “good” or “bad”, and expectations become very concrete and unalterable. Police officers sometimes seem particularly susceptible to this type of distortion, due to immersion in a chosen world of “good vs bad,” “victim vs offender,” and “cop vs criminal.”
2) Overgeneralization Individual experiences, events, or outcomes are used to create broad generalizations about people, places, or situations, and expectations are set accordingly. Any evidence or expectation of different outcomes is discounted, if not personally experienced, or goes unnoticed even if it is personally experienced but doesn’t fit what was expected. Overgeneralization leads to stereotyping, prejudging, and acting on preconceptions rather than unique information before you.
3) Mental Filtering Focus is placed on what are usually negative or upsetting aspects of something or someone while ignoring other, more positive aspects. Imagine a classic “Paper Nazi” sergeant who constantly sends back reports for minor corrections. No other sergeant does this to you, a lot of time is spent correcting minor – even inconsequential – errors, and this annoys you to no end. Mental filtering would let this individual quirk dominate your opinion of this particular boss, maybe even labeling her as a “bad” or “unreasonable” supervisor, while disregarding her knowledge, experience, and practice of “having the backs” of those under her.
4) Disqualifying the Positive By holding onto and obsessing about how bad you have it, how difficult your job/marriage/life is, or choosing to focus on the negative, we often lose sight of the good in our lives. This is normal; human beings are hypothesized to have a “negativity bias” – an evolutionary adaptation built into our psyches that formed out of our ancestors’ need to constantly scan for danger – the vestiges of which exist today. These ancient ancestors learned to overlook the benign and scan the horizon for what might attack, maul, kill, or eat them. Our modern brains have inherited some of that old wiring, which means the default mode for many of us is to focus on “danger” (the negative) and skip over what is “safe” (the positive). Add in police training and experience, and is it any wonder a lot of cops discount the positives in their lives.
5) Jumping to Conclusions Assuming something negative in a situation even when no evidence supports the negativity, or assuming the worst without considering evidence to the contrary. This happens when we rely on past negative experience to predict future outcomes and can create undue anxiety about events that have not even happened yet or set up “self-fulfilling prophecies.” For officers, jumping to conclusions has the added risk of closing minds to alternative outcomes, disregarding solid evidence that points to conclusions different than what is expected, and leading to serious professional errors.
6) Magnification and Minimization Negative experiences are magnified in scope and significance, while positive experiences are minimized or seen as rare one-offs with no meaning and offering no hope.
7) Emotional Reasoning Making decisions and basing arguments on emotional factors and how something makes you feel rather than objective rationality and carefully considered facts. A lot of people “go with their gut” instead of their head, leading to hasty – and sometimes disastrous – decisions. Instead of considering a reasoned balance of all factors, including hard truths that would be obvious to the cooler, more-analytical mind, they live in the moment, satisfying base desires and gratifying their inner two-year old, with all the success one would expect.
8) “Shoulding” Concentrating on what you think “should” happen or ought to be, rather than accepting and reacting to the situation actually before you. Cops often get stuck on what they think their agency or boss should be doing, how their spouse should be meeting their “needs”, and on all the good things that should be happening in their world. When what should happen doesn’t, they experience disappointment and stress, which only leads to further thought disorders, burnout, anxiety, and depression.
9) Labeling and Mislabeling Taking the source of your frustration, disappointment, anger, etc… and slapping a label on it (“My lieutenant is such an ________ for how he expects us to handle our calls”), or putting the label on yourself for failing to meet some real or imagined standard (“God, I’m such a loser. Everything I do in this relationship turns to crap”). The problem with labels is that they become definitive and limiting and setting up pretty much all the thought distortions listed above.
10) Personalization and Blame What Burns calls “the mother of guilt,” personalization occurs when you hold yourself personally responsible for an unfortunate or problematic event that may be minimally, if at all, under your control. Internalizing blame – making yourself the “villain” – leads to guilt and shame, or contributes to a sense of inadequacy. The opposite of personalization is assigning outward blame on another or others, regardless of their culpability, rejecting rightful personal responsibility.
Identifying and overcoming thought distortions – which any of us can experience and be influenced by – is a healthy practice necessary to lasting happiness.
