Have you ever had a thought that felt completely true in the moment,
Only to realize,
Wait,
That may have not been the whole story.
Maybe you made a mistake and immediately thought,
I always mess things up.
Or someone didn't respond to your text and your mind went straight to.
.
.
They must be mad with me.
Or maybe you felt anxious about something and assumed.
Things are going to go badly.
Well,
We all do this.
Our minds are constantly interpreting what's happening.
They create stories,
They make predictions,
Fill in the blanks.
And they often jump to conclusions.
And because these thoughts happen so quickly,
We often don't recognize them as thoughts.
We experience them as reality.
So today.
I want to talk about cognitive distortions.
These are the mental habits or the thinking patterns that can make situations feel worse.
Feel more threatening?
More personal.
Are more hopeless than they actually are.
And I also want to talk about how mindfulness can help us notice these thoughts without automatically believing them.
And this is because there's a big difference between having a thought and knowing that a thought is happening.
So Larry Rosenberg,
He's the founder of the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
He's written about this beautifully.
And he points out that human beings have this extraordinary capacity.
We don't just live our lives.
We can be aware.
That we are living our lives.
We can notice what is happening in the body.
We can notice emotions,
Physical sensations.
We can notice thoughts.
And he writes that there is all the difference in the world between thinking and knowing that a thought is happening.
And that distinction is incredibly powerful,
And it's an important component of mindfulness.
And that's because most of the time our thoughts feel like a running commentary on our lives.
Almost like a news station reporting on the facts.
But thoughts are not always facts.
Thoughts are mental events.
When you sit silently in meditation,
You'll notice they just show up,
Uninvited,
Out of seemingly nowhere.
Now,
Some thoughts are helpful,
Some are accurate,
Some are even wise.
But others are distorted,
Exaggerated,
Or simply not true.
So this idea has been central to cognitive therapy.
In the 1960s and 70s,
Psychiatrist Dr.
Aaron Beck He began noticing that people struggling with depression had a lot of these automatic negative thoughts.
He noticed these thoughts followed predictable patterns.
They tended to interpret events negatively,
Even when there wasn't clear evidence to support that interpretation.
But because these thoughts felt automatic,
They also felt really true,
Authentic.
So later,
One of Dr.
Beck's students,
Another Dr.
David Burns,
Help bring these ideas to a wider audience through his popular book called Feeling Good.
In this book,
He described many of the common thinking patterns that are now referred to within the field of psychology as cognitive distortions.
Now,
Others will call these unhelpful thoughts ants,
Which is short for automatic negative thoughts.
And that idea of ants makes a lot of sense to me.
Because ants are like that.
Uninvited guests at a picnic.
They show up quickly.
They can take over,
And they're usually not very helpful.
So automatic thoughts do the same thing.
They show up before we even realize what's happening and they can affect our mood,
Our behavior.
Our relationships.
Our self-esteem?
And even how we experience stress and pain.
So let's look at some of the most common cognitive distortions.
And there's a lot of them here.
I'm not going to get to all of them,
But I'm going to cover probably about seven or eight.
So bear with me,
But they're important.
So the first one is what we call all or nothing thinking.
And this is when we see things in extremes.
We think,
I'm not perfect,
I'm a failure.
Or if I make a mistake,
The whole thing becomes a disaster.
Or if I don't do this well.
I'm terrible at it.
There's just no middle ground.
There's no nuance,
No room for being human.
Okay,
So then the next one.
Is overgeneralization.
This is when we take one experience and turn it into a sweeping conclusion.
So something happens,
We say,
This always happens to me,
Or I never get it right.
Or no one ever listens to me.
So that's an overgeneralization.
Just one moment becomes the whole story.
Okay,
So another common distortion is what we call mental filtering.
And think about.
Filtering or a sieve.
This is when we focus on one negative detail and we filter out everything that's positive.
So for example.
Imagine you give a presentation and several people come up to you afterwards and tell you that it was really helpful,
Really insightful.
But one person says,
You look like you were nervous.
And that's the only comment you can remember.
The positive feedback.
That disappears and your mind locks onto that one negative comment.
Okay,
Now a related cognitive distortion to filtering is what we call disqualifying the positive.
And we all do this.
This is when something good happens,
But we dismiss it.
So someone compliments you and you think,
Oh,
They're just being nice.
Or you actually do something really well and you think,
It wasn't that big of a deal.
Or you receive support and you think.
Well,
That doesn't count because they're my friend.
They have to help me.
So instead of letting in the good,
The mind explains it away,
Minimizes it,
Or dismisses it.
I'm going to talk about two.
Cognitive distortions.
Where we jump to conclusions.
And the first one is referred to as mind reading.
This is when we assume that we know what someone else is thinking.
We automatically go,
They're annoyed with me.
She thinks I'm incompetent.
He didn't respond because he's mad.
We have no real evidence,
But the mind fills in the blanks and usually in the most painful direction.
So the second form of.
.
.
Making assumptions is what we call fortune-telling.
And this is when we assume we know what will happen in the future,
Just like who we are.
Fortune-telling or forecasting,
We'll jump to a conclusion like,
Things are going to turn out badly,
Or I know I'm going to fail.
Or it's just not going to work.
And here again,
The mind acts as if it has certainty,
When really it is just making a prediction.
Okay,
So here's another.
Common cognitive distortion and that's catastrophizing.
And this is when the mind immediately jumps to the worst case scenario.
You make a mistake at work and your mind says,
I'm going to be fired.
Where you feel a strange sensation in your body and your mind thinks,
I must be really sick.
Something's seriously wrong.
Or maybe someone is just being a little quiet and your mind says,
This relationship is falling apart.
So catastrophizing,
It doesn't just imagine a problem.
It imagines the worst possible outcome.
And then reacts as if that outcome is already happening.
Okay,
We're almost done,
But another one is emotional reasoning.
This is a tricky one.
Because this is when we assume that because we feel something,
It must be true.
And this comes up a lot,
Especially for a lot of women,
Comes up around guilt.
They feel guilty about something and then they have to think,
Did you really do something?
So again,
It's this idea that I feel anxious that something must be wrong.
Or I feel guilty,
So I must have done something bad.
Or I'm feeling inadequate,
So I must not be good enough.
But emotions are not always evidence,
Just like thoughts,
They're not facts.
Emotions are information and they do deserve our attention,
But they're not always accurate interpretations of reality.
Finally,
This is the last.
I just want to talk about should statements.
This is another cognitive distortion that we have.
We often will say to ourselves,
I should be better at this,
Or.
.
.
I shouldn't feel this way.
I should have known.
A really big cognitive distortion is this idea that this shouldn't be happening.
And these thoughts often sound like motivation,
But they usually create a feeling of shame and they put pressure on ourselves.
So one helpful question to ask when you're having these should statements is,
Who says I should feel differently?
Who says I should already know how to do this?
Who says I should never struggle?
And sometimes that question alone can create a little bit of that space that we're always looking for.
Okay,
So.
How does mindfulness help?
Mindfulness helps because it teaches us to notice thoughts as thoughts.
Not as fat.
Not as commands and not as absolute truth.
Just that.
Thoughts?
And when we are mindful,
We can pause and say,
Hmm.
I think that's catastrophizing.
Pretty sure that's mind reading.
R.
Recognize.
Hey,
That's all or nothing thinking.
Or that's a should statement.
Maybe we would realize,
Hey,
That's just my mind trying to protect me by predicting danger.
And in those moments of noticing.
That's when we're creating that space that is so helpful.
Because in those moments of noticing,
We're no longer completely caught inside the thought.
We're aware of it.
It's like we're looking at it from a distance.
It's not so close and consuming.
All of us.
Because awareness gives us options.
It gives us the opportunity to ask,
Is this thought true?
Is there any evidence for it?
Is there any evidence against it?
And is this thought helping me?
Or maybe we could say,
Is there a more balanced or compassionate way to see things?
All right,
So I want to be clear,
This doesn't mean that we're forcing ourselves to think positively.
That's not the goal.
The goal is not to replace every negative thought with a cheerful one.
The goal is to relate to our thoughts more wisely.
More honestly,
More compassionately.
We are not trying to shame ourselves for having distorted thoughts.
Everyone has them,
Believe me.
The mind is trying to make sense of things.
The mind is trying to protect us.
But sometimes it does that by exaggerating danger.
By predicting failure.
By replaying old stories or simply assuming the worst.
Mindfulness allows us to notice that process.
To take a step back.
Take a deep breath.
And to return to the present moment.
Larry Rosenberg tells a powerful story.
About stepping back and seeing things,
Seeing how he had been thinking about something in his book called Breath by Breath.
So he describes being in Korea on a very difficult 90-day silent retreat at a monastery.
The schedule was intense.
They woke up at 3 o'clock in the morning and practiced until 11 at night.
They did sitting meditation,
Walking meditation.
They had very little rest.
And then halfway through the retreat,
He learned that there was an ancient tradition at that monastery,
That around day 45,
They began one full week without any sleep.
As you can imagine,
His mind reacted.
He felt upset,
Frightened,
Even angry.
No one had told him about this ahead of time,
And the whole idea of a week without sleep sounded impossible.
He thought about that long week ahead,
And he was full of thoughts about how it would go,
How he would feel,
And whether or not he could do this.
So after the first day without sleep,
He was miserable.
So we asked for an interview with the Zen master,
An elderly teacher who had actually done the retreat many times before himself.
And the teacher told him something that stayed with him and that he wrote about in his book.
He told them the problem was not only the fatigue.
The problem was in Larry's thinking.
It was that Larry was carrying around this concept of seven days without sleep.
And he was carrying the thoughts.
Of the holy.
The story of the whole week and the fear of the whole week.
The teacher told him to put down that burgon.
To just take each daily activity one moment at a time.
Breath by breath.
One sitting period.
One walking period,
One meal,
One break.
Just this moment,
Just this breath.
And Rosenberg said that the week was in fact still very difficult,
But he got through it.
Not by conquering the whole week it is mine,
But by returning again and again to the present moment.
Now,
That story is extreme,
Of course.
Most of us are not going on 90-day retreats in monasteries.
And I hope none of us ever have to go a week without sleep.
Most of us are dealing with ordinary life,
However,
And that can be a lot.
Emails,
Family stress,
Health worries.
Work pressures,
Just everyday uncertainty.
Relationships.
Self-doubt and the same principle applies.
Our suffering often increases when the mind takes one difficult moment and turns it into a whole story.
And with mindfulness,
We can be aware of thoughts that distort our reality.
We can notice when we're thinking,
This will never end,
Or I can't handle this.
Or I always mess things up.
And then mindfulness invites us to come back to the present moment.
To put down the burden of these unhelpful thoughts.
And just come back into the moment,
To this breath,
This body.
This next wise step.
So,
The next time you notice your mind racing,
Judging,
Predicting,
Blaming,
Or catastrophizing,
You might see if you can pause.
You might say to yourself.
I'm aware that I'm having a thought.
You might even wonder like,
Hey,
I think this could be a cognitive distortion.
You could consider whether you might pause and take a breath and come back to the present moment.
And those small pauses,
They can be really powerful.
Because we can't always control which thoughts arise.
Like I said,
They're pretty automatic.
But we can learn to recognize them and we can learn how to relate to them.
We can learn to question them.
We can hold them more lightly or just simply put them down.
And we can learn to return again and again to the present moment.
Breath by breath.
One minute at a time.
So thank you for being here.
