cognitive distortions

All situations that happen to you in life have no inherent meaning. You are the one who signs a meaning, seeing a situation through a certain frame.

With cognitive reframing, you can change the way you look at something and consequently change how you experience it.

That kind of an approach enables you to implement the ancient wisdom that you can’t always control what happens to you, but you can certainly control how you react to different situations – no matter how tough your position might be.

And that’s the ultimate power you always possess.

If you want to change something, be it how you feel, how you do things or what you believe, the change always begins with you switching your thoughts and reframing how you see reality. Your thoughts about the situation that happened to you are always more important than the situation itself.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) offers two very practical and easily applicable exercises when it comes to managing thoughts and interpreting events:

• Emotional accounting – transforming specific negative thoughts into positive ones
• Cognitive reframing – transforming specific negative events into more positive ones

Both exercises work in pretty much the same way. Some event happens to you. You perceive an event as a negative one based on your toxic core beliefs. That causes automatic negative thoughts and negative feelings, which leads to inaction and depression.

With emotional accounting, you strive to transform automatic negative thoughts into more positive ones, while with cognitive reframing, you try to find a more constructive interpretation of what is happening to you.

That gives you an opportunity to neutralize negative feelings and be more action‑oriented.

The three key goals you want to achieve with cognitive reframing

Negative frames or stories that you tell yourself about different life situations are always based on irrational core beliefs that lead to self-defeating thoughts, emotions and actions. It’s like having a dark cloud above your head and seeing reality much darker than it is.

This is the so‑called cognitive triad, where you repeatedly emphasize:

1. The negative view of yourself
2. The negative view of the world
3. The negative view of the future

The main point of cognitive reframing is to find a more positive interpretation, view or experience of unexpected adverse events, concepts or even ideas that you dislike. With cognitive reframing, you challenge yourself to illuminate positive sides of challenging situations, avoid seeing only the negative, and identify a brighter narrative of what is happening to you.

If you manage to achieve all three goals with cognitive reframing, your ability to cope with the situation instantly improves and the negative effects, like severe anger, depression or hopelessness, are dramatically decreased.

Consequently, you can think, feel and act more rationally. What more could you ask for.

Where do the default frames come from?

Before we go to practical examples of how to do cognitive reframing, let me try to explain where frames come from as simply as possible. You’re experiencing life and everything that happens to you based on your subjective interpretation of reality. Let’s call it subjective reality.

Your subjective reality is anchored in your core beliefs, values, past life experiences, expectations and many other factors.

It’s your own lens of how you perceive life experiences as well as how you react to them – what’s good and what’s bad, what you like and what you don’t, what to focus on in a particular situation, which actions to take in a particular situation, what should happen, what you expect etc.

Consequently, no two people experience or react to the same event in completely the same way. We all experience life through our own subjective lens.

Let me give you two practical examples of how the subjective reality works:

• Several movies were shot based on the life of Steve Jobs. But every movie emphasizes different Jobs’ characteristics, situations and challenges. The movie is based on what the screenwriter, producer and director found important in Job’s story, based on their own knowledge, values, beliefs etc. Every film was created based on the subjective lens of Steve Jobs life. That’s why the films are so different. Similarly, some people see Steve as a hero, others as an impudent and egocentric maniac.
• Another example is when two people see a homeless dog on the street. One gets scared and carefully watches the dog’s every move, while the other runs straight to the dog and starts to pat him and show him love. Obviously in their subjective reality, one person sees the homeless dog as a danger and the other as an animal that needs even more love than others.

Different territories on your subjective map of reality are called schemas. Schemas are mental structures providing a framework for representing some aspect of the world. They help you organize the vast majority of information in a manageable way.

You use schemas to organize your current knowledge but they also provide a framework for further understanding – predicting what will or should happen in the future. They influence your attention and absorption of knowledge. They also represent your core beliefs.

Schemas, the main source of your frames, are extremely stable, enduring and hard to change.

When schemas are triggered, they generate automatic thoughts, strong effects and behavioral tendencies. Consequently, they can cause us all quite a lot of problems. Stereotypes, prejudices and cognitive biases are all based on negative schemas.

Schema therapy knows 18 maladaptive schemas that can rarely be changed without therapy and cause all kinds of psychological problems, including cognitive distortions. Examples of early maladaptive schemas are shame, sense of incompetence, entitlement, self-sacrifice, pessimism, and so on.

Many schemas are packed in “should” statements and your expectations towards yourself and others. When your expectations and “should” statements escalate into unrealistic proportions, they immediately become toxic. Play a little bit by answering the following questions (ask yourself why 5-times after initially answering the question):

• How should the world function?
• How should you behave in a particular situation?
• What should happen in a particular situation?
• How other people should behave towards you?
• What kind of promotion should you get?
• How many hours per day should you work?
• What kind of food should you eat? etc.

If we take a step further, we could say that schemas are based on a set of frames. You can apply one schema to many different situations, and that’s called a frame. Your thoughts and feelings about the homeless dog are based on a schema you possess. Meeting a dog in a shelter or on the street are two different frames.

A frame is like stopping for a moment, taking a snapshot of something that is currently happening to you, and letting your mind analyze the situation in detail through your main schemas and overall subjective reality.

While schemas are really hard to change, switching to a new frame can be a little bit easier. That’s where cognitive reframing comes into play.

You take a very specific situation from your life and you try to develop a more positive view on it – with that, you influence your thinking pattern and feelings about that particular situation, but you also slightly update your schemas and overall subjective reality in a more positive way.

ABCDE – The formula for easily doing cognitive reframing on your own

It’s helpful if a professional therapist leads you through cognitive reframing, but you can also easily do it on your own. Cognitive reframing is based on the ABC model constructed by Albert Ellis, one of the fathers of cognitive therapy.

The first step is to write down three things:

• Accurate description of the event: The event that bothers you and leads to automatic dysfunctional thinking is called an activating event. As the first step, try to describe what happened as accurately as possible.
• Belief: Describe how you see the situation as accurately as possible. Try to identify your main beliefs around the event that happened. Help yourself with the following three questions:
  • What caused the situation to happen?
  • What does the event say about you?
  • What do you think should happen?
• Consequence: The consequence of what happened interpreted through your beliefs results in a certain way of thinking, feeling and acting. As a consequence, there are three more questions to answer:
  1. What kind of automating negative thoughts go through your mind? Write them down and identify the cognitive distortion.
  2. How do you feel about the event? Identify all the negative emotions (on a scale from 0 – 100%).
  3. What’s your automatic action? Describe your actual response to the situation.

This should give you a really good overview of how you see the event, what are your underlying beliefs and how you feel, think and behave as an automatic response to the event.

Now it’s time to do cognitive reframing. To achieve that we will add D – Dispute and E – Effective change to our model (ABC-DE).

• Dispute: Dispute is about challenging your thoughts and beliefs in order to see reality more accurately. It’s about finding a better frame that enables you to neutralize the situational emotions and act more rationally. There is a set of questions you should answer in the dispute process:
  1. If the same thing happened to your best friend or someone you love, what would be your interpretation of the event then?
  2. How would [enter the name of your role model] interpret this situation?
  3. What are other potential explanations besides blaming yourself?
  4. What was under your control and you could have done better, and what was completely out of your control?
  5. What are all the counterarguments to your underlying beliefs? Your past accomplishments, the things you do have, the praise you got, everything that proves the event is an exception.
  6. What’s the worst thing that could realistically happen and how bad would that be?
  7. What difference will this one-time event make in a month, a year or a decade?
  8. Are you sure that you are completely powerless in the situation? List all the moves you can make to get yourself in a better position.
  9. Is thinking this way helping the situation or making it worse?
  10. What is the most positive interpretation of the event you can think of?
• Effect: Write down the final effect. The final effect should be a more accurate view of the situation with a better narrative, disarmed negative thoughts and feelings, and an action plan for performing better in the given situation.
  1. Write down your new thoughts about the event
  2. Write down your new feelings about the event
  3. Write down the action plan you will put in motion

You can download the free template below to professionally perform cognitive reframing whenever needed:

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• Cognitive reframing – Exercise file (xls)

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The point of cognitive reframing is to find a new better frame (angle, filter or story) of how you look at a specific event. A frame that can be supported by constructive underlying beliefs, one that doesn’t cause negative feelings and thoughts enables you to keep all the necessary personal power in your own hands for acting and responding properly and rationally.

Now, the most important thing is that your reframing is still based on truth. You absolutely shouldn’t start lying to yourself or suppress feelings or use the tool in any other negative way. It’s not about daydreaming and denying the seriousness of a situation. It’s about responding more wisely and rationally.

Here’s a practice example of cognitive reframing (a shorter version):

• Antecedent: I just lost a big consulting contract.
• Automatic belief: I’m worthless and nobody will hire me.
• Consequence: Anger (90%), Depression (80%).

And now let’s describe the same situation by doing cognitive reframing:

• Antecedent: I just lost a big consulting contract.
• Belief after dispute: It was obvious that we weren’t a good fit. That gives me a very good insight into what kind of clients I should look for and how I can improve my marketing materials.
• Effect: Now I can easily prepare a list of 5 potential clients and contact them. The new feelings present are – Anger (20%), Depression (30%), Inspiration (70%).

And, of course, then a detailed plan follows: The best way to find new better clients for me is to upgrade my marketing materials, prepare a list of 50 potential buyers, rank them according to how well we fit together and get in contact with them. For every client that rejects me, I must gather feedback to even better define my offer and market segment.

With cognitive reframing, your job is to turn:

• a problem into an opportunity,
• weakness into strength (by matching or converting),
• hurtful actions of others into understanding why they’re doing that instead of being a victim or engaging in fights, and so on.

But again, the idea is to turn a problem into an opportunity and ACT. You mustn’t only make yourself feel a little bit better.

Your goal is to try to view a situation differently, but you shouldn’t deny the reality of the situation.

You must fight hard to hold your frame after reframing a situation

When you do cognitive reframing, you will soon see that your mind constantly strives to slip back into your previous toxic thinking. Your mind, even after cognitive reframing, is like a small child (or rather a drunken monkey) constantly testing the limits and trying to wander off and bite you in the ass along the way.

That’s why you need to perform another exercise along with cognitive reframing. It’s called holding your frame.

When you do cognitive reframing and see reality in a more positive way, hold to the new frame strongly. Don’t let it go for even a second. Don’t slack off; hold your frame no matter what. No retreat, no surrender.

If you don’t stubbornly hold to your new positive frame, you will lose it and you will go back to your previous thinking.

So, every time your mind tries to wander off and hurt you by seeing life more negative than it really is, consistently hold your new positive view in your head. You have to be stronger than the “mind monkeys”, and sooner or later your mind will give up on the negative view.

Two useful tips for performing cognitive reframing

Cognitive reframing is a very simple and useful exercise, but it does come with a few challenges. Unfortunately, you can’t just force a new frame of thinking on yourself. You have to lead yourself towards the new frame slowly.

That can be achieved in two ways:

1. Ask yourself the right questions
2. Neutralize the negative feelings

Start asking yourself the right questions

You must start (if a therapist isn’t leading you through the process) by asking yourself the right questions, identifying new observations, systematically analyzing the accuracy of your thoughts, and finding internal or external misunderstandings.

Optimal thinking and questions like those found below can help you a lot with this matter:

• What went right? What was positive in the situation?
• What are the bright spots in this situation?
• How can I turn this disaster into a win?
• What is the best way to act in this kind of a situation?
• What if I believed the opposite? And then try to find the evidence against your thought.
• What did the person who raised me do well (not only wrong?)

By asking yourself the right questions and then performing cognitive reframing, you want to learn the cognitive errors you make, challenge your conclusions or limiting beliefs, replace toxic beliefs, or find a redemptive narrative for a tragic situation that happened to you.

Cognitive reframing comes in especially handy when something happens that completely throws you out of your emotional center.

Neutralize the negative feelings

Before even starting with the cognitive process, you have to neutralize the negative feelings a little bit. You must loosen up before changing your frame.

The negative mind is really stubborn and in the depths of struggle, it’s hard to see anything positive. Thus, you must first neutralize your severe negative emotions a little bit .

The best ways to neutralize your emotions are:

• Some kind of a surprise or shock – exercise, shouting into a pillow, cold shower etc.
• Curiosity over why something happened to you – curiously researching what lead to the situation and why
• Practical demonstration of improvement – exploring how others solved the same situation or getting a mentor
• Clear instructions for what to do next – getting madly educated about the situation
• Humor as the best coping mechanism – finding the funny side of a painful situation

When you are performing cognitive reframing, make sure you don’t fall into potential traps. The most common ones are excessive fantasizing, seeing reality with rose-colored glasses or finding a good excuse for procrastination or malicious behavior.

That’s not what this exercise is for. The main point of cognitive reframing is to find the bright spots, neutralize negative emotions, prepare for action and scale what already works.

In this blog post you will learn how to really think positively and how to simply transform negative thoughts into positive ones (or at least neutralize the darkest ones).

As we all know it, positive thinking is a very important part of a happy and successful life, but you can’t just decide to think more positively. If it were that simple, everyone would be happy and optimistic and super positive.

As you can’t just decide to think more positively, you also can’t force yourself into positive thinking. It will only make you miserable. Trust me, I tried that approach.

When you try to force yourself into positive thinking, every time a negative thought crosses your mind, you will only get mad and angry and disappointed, and that means even more negative thoughts.

You accomplish the opposite.

What you need is a simple step-by-step process to gently outsmart your negative thoughts. The solution to more positive thinking lies in the so-called:

1. Mental biofeedback
2. Emotional accounting
3. Thought stopping.

These three exercises are from the cognitive therapy, very well described in the book Feeling Good by David D. Burns. They are by far the best exercises when it comes to mind management and training yourself to think more positive.

They’re so simple mind exercises, yet so powerful.

Where the name comes from and why is emotional accounting so effective

The first step in transforming negative thoughts into positive ones is to systematically observe your thoughts and your feelings.

For example, by counting your negative thoughts, you automatically pay closer attention to what is going on in your mind. You develop special kind of mind awareness. You can finally see how negative thoughts cause negative feelings. In the next step, by categorizing your thoughts, you observe them even more closely and carefully.

In the end, with specifying the type of feeling and its intensity (0 % – 100 %) that comes with different types of thoughts, you become master of emotional and thought accounting. That’s where the origin of the name comes from.

Emotional accounting simply means identifying, recording, measuring, classifying, verifying, interpreting and auditing your thoughts. The same thing as traditional accounting does with numbers and business events. It’s a very efficient self-reflection exercise and a good way of determining how much your feelings actually improve after neutralizing your negative thoughts.

Now that you know where the name comes from, let’s dive deeper into why emotional accounting is so effective. Every toxic thought that appears in your head comes from somewhere. And it comes from your inner critic.

The inner critic is part of your mind that’s dark, negative and evil and only wants to hurt you and others. It’s usually an internalized voice of your overcritical, cold or neglecting parents. An event happens in your life (positive or negative) and your inner critic automatically attacks you with a bunch of negative thoughts. Nothing is ever right for the inner critic.

If you let the inner critic become too strong, it’s like having a negative, unloving, rigorous grumbler in your head, blocking you from being happy, proud, powerful and going forward.

In all of us an “inner critic” resides, making sure you strive for progress and improvements (with encouragements and compassion when things don’t go as planned); but if the inner critic becomes too strong, it has the power to turn your life into a real misery and agony. At least in your own mind.

Your job is to protect yourself from the inner critic. And you do that with emotional accounting.

In practical terms, emotional accounting simply means talking back to your inner critic in a very systematic, structured and analytical way. That’s it. Your mind tries to criticize you to make reality seem darker than it is, but you don’t let your mind do that. You stop your negative mind and stand up for yourself.

Cognitive distortions – the main weapon of your inner critic

With emotional accounting, you protect yourself from your negative mind by talking back to the inner critic. The main weapon of your inner critic (or your negative mind, if you will) are cognitive distortions. Cognitive distortions are an extreme form of negative thoughts.

With cognitive distortions, you see reality much darker than it really is. It’s a trick your mind plays on you. Consequently, that arouses negative feelings in you as well as causes longer periods of depression or severe mood swings. That makes your mind weak, emotions fragile, and the world a miserable place to live.

Your negativity is in many cases not based on accurate perceptions of reality, but is instead the product of mental slippage. Bad things do happen to people, but not as often as your mind would like you to think.

It might seem that thoughts are only thoughts, but the extent of negative thinking is enormous. Your mood slumps, your self-image crumbles, your body doesn’t function properly, your willpower becomes paralyzed and your own actions defeat you. That’s why negative thinking needs to be dealt with once and for all.

There are many different types of cognitive distortions (somewhere between 10 – 20, depending on different definitions). They are your negative mind’s arsenal. Reading about them will immediately help you identify negative thoughts that pop up in your head.

And once you can easily identify them, you also have a good chance of fighting them off. The better you understand how your enemy works (your negative mind), the better chances you have to stop it and win.

Below is the list of the 10 main cognitive distortions:

1. All-or-nothing thinking: You see your situation as black and white, you want to have everything or nothing. Everything is unreachable perfection, and consequently you feel like you have nothing. But that’s far from the truth.
2. Overgeneralization: You generalize one bad event that happened to you (rejection, for example) as a never-ending pattern that you can’t do anything about.
3. Mental filter: You see only negatives and minuses and ignore all the benefits and pluses.
4. Discounting the positives: You give zero value to your past accomplishments, strengths and positive qualities. They don’t count, because everyone has them.
5. Jumping to conclusions / Mind reading / Catastrophizing: You predict that things will turn out badly, even if you don’t have any proof for that, or you assume people will react negatively or reject you, again without any proof. Catastrophizing is jumping to negative conclusions on steroids.
6. Magnification or minimization: You make a big deal out of small, not really important details, or you shrink things that are important to almost nothing.
7. Emotional reasoning: You draw the conclusion that how you temporarily feel is who you really are. For example: “I feel like I didn’t write this well enough, so I must really be a bad writer”.
8. “Should statements”: You criticize yourself and others based on what you or they should, must, or have to do. You moralize to others and yourself.
9. Labeling: You put a negative label on your identity based on perceived shortcomings, even if they’re not real. “I’m a complete loser”, would be a nice example.
10. Blame and personalization: You blame yourself for things that were not your responsibility or you blame others for things that were your responsibility. Or you assume that no matter what other people do, they do it to block you or harm you personally. You also constantly compare yourself to others.

And a few others very common cognitive distortions that can make your life a real misery:

11. Always be right: Being wrong is simply unthinkable to you. You try to prove that every one of your actions or thoughts is correct. You try to persuade others to think the same way you do.
12. Fallacy of fairness: You feel resentful or envious, because you think you know better what would be a fairer situation, than other people do.
13. Fallacy of change: You expect other people to change or the world to change more to your liking and wants. And your happiness seems to depend on that kind of change.
14. Fallacy of being a good person: You expect being a good person and sacrificing for others will pay off somehow and when it doesn’t you feel bitter.
15. Hindsight thinking and what-ifs: You look back at your past decisions and make judgments how you could handle things better. But you handled it according to your knowledge and experience at that time. In the same way, you might constantly ask yourself “what if” about your future, but you’re never satisfied with the answer.
16. Control error: You either see yourself as a helpless being with no personal power or control. Consequently, you feel stuck and externally controlled. The other extreme is if you feel responsible for everything and want to control everything.
17. Unrealistic comparison: You compare yourself with other people, viewing them better as you are, not considering different starting points, life circumstances, genetic advantages, random luck events etc.

These are all the different ways how your mind plays tricks on you. Now let’s look at a few ways, how you can fight back, with the emphasis on the emotional accounting.

Exercise 1: Mental biofeedback – a warm up for emotional accounting

The easiest exercise to start dealing with toxic thoughts is the so-called mental biofeedback, which as mentioned comes from cognitive behavioral therapy. The idea of the exercise is to start counting your negative thoughts. Just counting, nothing else. This way, you become more aware of your toxic thoughts.

You simply buy a counter to click or draw a line in a notebook every time you catch yourself with a thought that isn’t part of the rational mindset. After counting your negative thoughts for a few days, you can slowly take a step further as stated below.

• Step 1: Only count toxic thoughts for a few days or even weeks
• Step 2: Count toxic thoughts, but also write them down
• Step 3: Count them, write them down and categorize them (what kind of cognitive distortion it is – have a list of cognitive distortions always with you to refresh your memory)

Soon you will learn to identify any kind of toxic thinking and poor mentality, and categorize thoughts very quickly. If you follow this (empathy) process for a few weeks, you will learn to identify and categorize thoughts in the blink of an eye.

Now it’s time to transform negative thoughts into more positive ones or at least neutralize them.

Exercise 2: Thought accounting or emotional accounting

The more you practice, the easier it will be to recognize negative thoughts. Especially be mindful of your thoughts when you’re in a bad mood or when you have a bad day. After a few months, it will become natural for you to identify and categorize different kinds of toxic thoughts on the fly.

The next important question in the process is what to do with all these toxic thoughts. Well, you neutralize them or even transform them into positive ones with emotional accounting.

The main point of emotional accounting is to practice talking back to your inner critic with the goal of developing a more realistic self-evaluation system or an evaluation of the situation you are in.

You simply go column by column. By far the most important is the column where you perform a rational response to the toxic thought. That’s the part of emotional accounting you need to pay most attention to.

It’s the self-defense against your negative mind. After you perform a rational response, it’s also useful to pay attention to the changes that come up in your feelings. If you perform the exercise correctly, you should immediately feel better. The negativity should be reduced.

Please note that there is always some kind of an event or outer stimulus that leads your mind to an automatic negative thought. Your job is to identify the situation and the automatic response and then perform self-defense.

Yes, you have to defend yourself from your own negative mind. In a way you must gently outsmart your mind to not distort reality in a negative way.

Let’s look at an example of emotional accounting.

• Situation: I get an article back from my proofreader.
• Automatic negative thought (self-criticism): I’m making so many grammar mistakes, I am a really poor writer.
• Accompanying negative feelings: Anger, frustration (80%)
• Type of negative thoughts: Overgeneralization, self-labeling, fixed mindset, reactive thinking, problem-oriented
• Rational response (self-defense): Even if I still make quite a lot of grammar mistakes, I have great ideas for articles, my style is improving and so is my grammar, and I get a lot of positive feedback on my articles.
• New feelings: Anger, frustration (20%), feeling proud of myself (60%)
• Action-oriented mindset: The best way to improve my grammar is to have a great proofreader, read as much as possible, and do a few grammar exercises.

Now it’s time for you to do the exercise. Think of the last thing that made you really mad, frustrated or depressed. Or maybe you are facing such a situation right now. Try to do the exercise for three situations that are currently arousing negative feelings in your life.

Every time you find yourself in a bad mood, frowning or you overreact to a situation, do emotional accounting and see how much better you will instantly feel. Use the template in the beginning to reprogram your mind, but soon you will perform self-defense automatically whenever your negative mind attacks you.

Emotional accounting completely changed my life and how my mind works. The only situation where emotional accounting doesn’t work instantly (at least in my case) are severe emotional flashbacks, where the intensity of emotions is so strong, I can’t even identify negative thoughts.

Below you can download an Excel table that will help you do the emotional accounting:

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• Emotional Accounting – Template (xls)

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Exercise 3: Thought stopping – setting boundaries to your inner critic

One more very useful cognitive exercise you can use in the battle with your negative mind is thought stopping. This exercise can be very effective when your negative mind is attacking you with the same negative thought over and over again or when you’re tired and talking back to your inner critic seems like an exercise in futility.

Thought-stopping is a process of interrupting and stopping your inner critic with pure willpower. You can simply say to your inner critic “No!”, “Stop!” or “Shut up!” when cognitive distortions get condensed and the mental process is directed towards drasticising, dramatizing and looking for perfection.

Thought-stopping is about setting boundaries against any anti-self process. It’s about stopping the mental war against yourself. As you will see with time, successfully stopping the inner critic demands practicing thought-stopping thousands upon thousands of times.

Anytime the critic gets too loud, you simply have to stop it, especially if emotional accounting doesn’t work. Thought stopping is so effective because saying “No!” is the backbone of the human instinct of self-protection.

Now you know your weapons that will help you deal with your negative mind. The best way is to start with mental biofeedback to better understand how your negative mind works, and which cognitive distortions are its favorite ones.

Then start practicing emotional accounting with the goal to neutralize the negative thoughts and to see reality as it is and not even one shade darker. And when your inner critic is to persistent, stop it with a firm no. If necessary, do it thousands and thousands of times.

When you learn to stand for yourself against your own negative mind – the stronger bully there is, you automatically feel much better about yourself and the world. Remember, even the worst enemy can’t hurt you as bad as your negative mind can. Don’t let that happen.

Source for emotional accounting: Cognitive behavioral therapy & David Burns: Feeling Good (2008) and Pete Walker: Complex PTSD: From surviving to thriving

A child accidentally spills milk and the next thing s/he hears is “you’re so clumsy” or maybe even “you’re my clumsy little baby” with a kind, cynical voice. Then s/he hears it again and again and again, and soon s/he starts to believe that s/he really is clumsy.

Every small ineptitude that happens later in the adult age makes the person feel horrible, enforcing the clumsiness label even further.

I see it all the time, how people label themselves without any solid proof:

• I’m not that smart
• I constantly make mistakes
• I’m not a practical type of person
• I’m not good with technology
• I’m bad at sports

And they label other people too:

• He’s a jerk
• He’s irresponsible
• She’s weird

There are two options when it comes to labeling yourself or others. A label might be complete fiction. Just a falsely installed belief that has nothing to do with reality. Or there really is some behavioral drawback present, but by labeling you make that one single behavior into a characteristic and apply it to the person as a whole.

Both types of labeling (or name-calling) bring nothing but negative thoughts and energy in your life.

The measure of a man is the mistakes he makes. That’s something your negative mind would say.

A negative self-label might be complete fiction

Many times, a label is complete fiction. For example, a parent decided to label the child as a clumsy one, based on completely perfectionistic expectations. In their mind, other babies never spilled any milk. Not even once.

So even a small error seems like solid proof for the negative label. Perfectionism has zero tolerance for any small errors, which are in reality part of everyday human life.

The adult person might then be as “clumsy” as any other human being. But when they break a glass, get a flat tire, don’t score a goal or any other thing happens to them that’s a pretty normal part of life, the feeling that they are the clumsiest creature on Earth resurfaces. An emotional flashback happens.

If the error happens in the presence of other people, they explain the label to other people – “I was always a little bit clumsy” or something like that. With every such explanation, they only reinforce their negative self-image.

People who aren’t observant might even believe them, but the observant ones are confused a little bit, because they don’t see any proof for such a negative label.

Make sure you find solid proof for every negative self-label you have:

• Do you statistically spill milk more often than the average person?
• Do you statistically make more mistakes than the average person?
• Are there really zero practical tasks you can accomplish?
• If you took a 100-hour technology class, how far would you really get?
• Is there not a single sport you’re really good at?

Don’t equate yourself with a single event or situation. Don’t believe everything your parents told you. Nobody is perfect. As we said, there is no perfection in real life.

Well, some things might really not be your forte. But maybe you are good enough. Which is just fine. Then there’s no need for a negative label.

A negative label is the most convenient way to protect your ego

We love to give negative labels to other people, especially when we need to protect our ego and minimize other people’s accomplishments. Negative labels are a great way to throw shit at other people and feel a little bit better about ourselves.

If a person is emotionally immature, then more successful and competent people irritate their ego. Every person who’s better at something is a source of humiliation; at the end of the day, they’re better at something.

Thus, ego tries to protect the immature ones. And then we hear expressions like:

• She might be beautiful, but she’s definitely stupid.
• He did make a lot of money, but he must be so greedy.
• He did win the competition, but he was probably cheating.
• She was promoted, but she’s a really bad person.

Sour grapes, sweet lemons and negative labels are ways to protect your ego when you encounter people that have more of something than you.

Sour grapes refer to self-deception where you make things that you want but don’t have less desirable, and with sweet lemons, you make things that you do have but are not that important to you more desirable. And with negative labels you make other people shine less than they do deserve.

You can’t be the best at everything. And there is enough for everyone. If you want more of something, go get it. Try to be happy for others when they win. And soon there won’t be any need for negative labels. Don’t create hostility with negative labels.

When a label is not based in fiction

Not all labels are based in fiction. Sometimes a label can be based on some solid proof. The problem occurs when we apply one single characteristic to the person as a whole.

• Because he’s late sometimes, he must be irresponsible.
• Because he doesn’t use a fax machine, he must be bad with technology.

You make assumptions about the person based on one event, fact or a single piece of information. But what if your assumption is completely wrong?

What if he’s not irresponsible because he’s late, he’s only going through a really hectic period in his life. You know that wrong assumptions are the mother of all fuckups, so never make assumptions about people too fast.

The problem with labeling others negatively is that you can’t do very much about it. If you label somebody as irresponsible, stupid, clumsy, un-techy or un-sporty, there’s no room for improvement, no room for growth.

It’s based on a fixed mindset, with no solution to the negative situation. But if you un-label someone and focus on their behavior, there is suddenly room for improvement. There’s suddenly an action plan that can be put in place.

You can teach a person to use a fax machine, you can talk with them to not be late or repeat any other similar behavior, you can find a sport you dislike the least and start practicing it, and so on.

Negative labels usually mark people with a negative characteristic that they can do nothing about. And that’s big distorted thinking in a negative way. Everyone can improve.

Negative labels are a great way to create distance in relationships

If a person has a low capacity for love, they strive to create distance even in the closest relationships. There is a subconscious fear of abandonment and even if distance seems like a good risk mitigation strategy, it’s not.

The distance drives people away. In the end, they leave, doing exactly what we’re afraid of.

There are many ways to create distance. Criticism, irresponsibility, passive-aggressiveness and a negative label, of course. Your mind can easily find one thing about your spouse, friend, relative, business partner or lover that you focus on and that irritates you every time you’re together.

A small behavior, body part or something for which you can create a negative label and that goes through your mind over and over again. Well, not only in your mind, you throw it straight in the face of the people you love. You eat so fast, your gluttony is killing me.

In reality, you’re probably only afraid of closeness, you’re afraid of accepting the other person as they are and having a close connection. A multidimensional connection. There is absolutely always a better solution than throwing labels in people’s faces.

Labeling is nothing but an extreme form of overgeneralization that belittles you and others and destroys relationships. Don’t let your negative mind run on fear, trying to protect your ego with immature mechanisms.

Humans do exist. But fools, losers and jerks do not. David Burns

Remember, it’s probably not a characteristic, but rather a behavior that can be improved or changed; if the label is not only fiction in your head. Instead of labeling, try to accurately describe the behavior that bothers you, and figure out why with the 5-whys analysis.

Then talk with the other person about it, in the most kind and honest way possible. And stop labeling yourself and others, it only brings negativity to your life and the life of others.

The all-or-nothing mindset (also known as polarized thinking, dichotomous thinking or “black‑and‑white thinking”) is a common thinking error that turns you into a bitter perfectionist who gets emotionally irritated by the smallest deviations from unreachable expectations.

Since your expectations are completely unrealistic, and then life happens, you are constantly irritated, bitter and depressed.

With all-or-nothing thinking, any small imperfection turns your life into a big drama. Many times, you even tend to blame yourself for it. And during the day, many imperfections always do happen.

How good can you feel then about yourself and life? Once you become aware of your all-or-nothing thinking patterns and how silly they are, you can finally breathe easier and calm down.

Here are some examples of all-or-nothing thinking:

• In partnership: You see your partner as perfect and you are so madly in love. They are smart, charming, caring, passionate … everything you ever wanted. Then one day they don’t call you or you have a little fight for whatever reason. And the relationship isn’t perfect anymore, it goes from everything to nothing. You start to dwell on how unlucky you are, you focus on your partner’s imperfections and how you don’t deserve real love.
• In other relationships: The same can happen in every relationship … with your parents, kids, or friends. They might be wonderful, until they do the slightest thing that’s not within your expectations, and the value of the relationship falls to nothing.
• At your job: You want it all, a high salary, good job, creative type of work, flexibility, the best coworkers, good bonuses etc. And then one single thing that doesn’t completely meet your expectations makes your job the worst job in the world.
• In an exam: You provided really good answers to all of the questions in an exam, except one. But because of this one question, you feel horrible and ashamed, the examiner will see you for the fake you are or you might even fail the test.
• Diet: You decide to follow a new diet. But because it’s so demanding, you only manage to follow it 90% of the time. But this 90% feels like you completely failed the diet, you’ll never lose weight and you feel like complete loser.
• Different life situations: Travelling, wedding, almost any situation where you have unrealistic expectations. You expect your travel or wedding to be perfect, and then a mosquito bites you, and everything turns into the worst experience of your life.
• How you see yourself: The favorite target of your mind is unfortunately you. Consequently, you are no exception in going from everything to nothing. For example, you might have a nice day and feel good, but then you make a small error at work, and suddenly you are worth nothing.

When you mind is thinking in absolute all-or-nothing terms, usually words (absolute terms) like “always”, “never”, “every”, “nothing”, “either … or” are used. You don’t see things holistically, but only as right or wrong, good or bad, black or white and middle ground is not considered.

All-or-nothing thinking usually comes with a “should” statement and strong feelings of self-blame. You convince yourself that things should be different (more perfect) and then on top of that, you often blame yourself for the situation.

You focus on how your shortcomings, bad decisions, failures or mistakes have gotten you in such a horrible situation. You know that you are not good enough, that you don’t deserve things and that you’re a compete loser.

Everything starts with unrealistic expectations

All-or-nothing thinking always starts with unrealistic expectations. You unconsciously set the bar so high, it’s simply unreachable. And then your mind keeps guard for any small deviation, an imperfection that happens sooner or later.

When that happens, you are devastated and can’t believe how unlucky you are. But that’s only your mind trying to make your life miserable.

It’s absolutely good to keep high standards and strive for the best, but at the same time you must keep realistic expectations. There’s no such thing as a perfect job, every job has its pluses and minuses.

People do make mistakes, even you, and that’s pretty normal. All relationships have their ups and downs. Mosquitos do bite if you decide to go on a travel adventure during the summer.

Making a fixed vision of how something must turn out perfectly, otherwise it’s worth nothing is a formula for making sure an experience will be shitty for you.

Because even when the highest standards are met, you can always find some imperfections to dwell on. There can always be this one small thing that makes everything worthless. That kind of thinking can only bring misery to your life.

Extreme form of thinking: I’m either a success or a failure. If I don’t do everything perfectly, then I’m a failure. An outcome less than 100% equals 0%.

If you are wondering where that kind of thinking comes from, it’s very simple. You want everything to be perfect in order to be more loved, admired and accepted.

And you assume that every small imperfection will put you on a judging stand, where people will gossip how unworthy of love you are. But that’s only your perception, because nothing was probably good enough for your parents.

The problem is that in your mind, everything goes to nothing

The problem with all-or-nothing thinking is going from 100% to 0% and then back to 100% and again back to 0% again and again.

You swing from a perfect illusion in your mind until you find a small imperfection and then everything goes to nothing. When things calm down, you might go straight back to your illusion until you spot another imperfection.

Everything is perfect, you had one little fight, and your mind is already at a breakup. You feel wonderful at your job, it’s perfect, it’s just that the salary could be 10% higher, and suddenly you’re dreaming of how much better other jobs must be and how unlucky you are.

You have this good friend who never lets you down, and this one time they didn’t call, and you’re so mad at them, you never expected they can be so irresponsible. A mosquito bites you, a mosquito … on a dreamy Thai island and now your arm itches, how can you enjoy the view now …

Sometimes in life, things do get shitty. Sometimes bad things do happen. Some things in life are unacceptable and can really throw you out of the center.

But more often than not, your mind tries to convince you that things are much darker and terrible than they actually are. When that happens it’s time to stop your mind and enjoy life instead.

If things go 80% your way on your wedding day, maybe that’s a realistic expectation. And for the other 20% you might just surrender and accept that not everything is under your control.

The problem doesn’t occur if you see a few errors and try to correct them, or strive to make things even better the next time. The problem is when a person, situation or experience goes to complete shit, destruction, misery, worthlessness, devastation or ruin just because something (small) didn’t go as you expected.

A small imperfection, and suddenly you don’t see the good things anymore. Everything is bad, black. All the pluses are gone. If you can’t have it perfect, you would rather have nothing. That’s not how life works.

The gray areas where life unfolds

It’s only your mind’s illusion that people would love you more if you were perfect. It’s only your mind’s dirty misconception that you can only be happy if you have the perfect job, the perfect wedding, trip, spouse, friends or anything else.

You can be happy, even when life is not perfect. Because life rarely is perfect, since there are almost no absolutes in this world.

No emotionally healthy person would expect you to be perfect. That can only be an expectation from people who suffer from the same cognitive distortions and people who are unhappy with themselves. As you are when you think in absolute terms.

Perfect standards are shared only among unhappy people, your inner critic and probably your parents who were never satisfied. It’s time to take a step out of this vicious circle. It’s time to free yourself and be happy in all life’s imperfections.

Every job has its pluses and minuses. There are always minuses present. Long working hours, long commute, boring work, average salary or whatever. You don’t have to suffer at a job you hate, but you can find a job that meets most of your standards and then simply enjoy your work. A small thing you don’t like is not a big enough reason to make yourself miserable at work.

On every vacation, some things don’t go as expected. Maybe a hotel room is smaller than you expect, there are too many rainy days or your wallet gets stolen. These things happen all the time. But most of them can be solved quickly or should simply be accepted since they are out of your control, and then you can continue enjoying your vacation.

And every relationship has its pluses and minuses. Every relationship has its ups and downs. And there is always some annoying behavior you don’t like about every single person. Being late, laughing too loudly or talking a little bit too much. But that doesn’t make a relationship worthless. That’s not something to fixate your mind on. Instead focus on all the positives.

Life unfolds in the gray areas. There are no black and whites. Don’t bring things in your mind from everything, when they seem perfect, to nothing when the smallest thing doesn’t go according to your expectations.

It doesn’t make sense to go from 100% to 0% when only 5% doesn’t go as you expected. Don’t go for perfect, go for good enough instead.

In everything good, there is something bad

You are probably familiar with the Yin and Yang symbol from the Chinese philosophy. The symbol perfectly illustrates the duality of life, how contrary forces are interdependent and interconnected, and how nothing can be perfect in the natural world.

The only thing I would add are gray areas on the borders between the dualities.

First of all, the good can’t exist without the bad. If you didn’t experience at least some sorrows, troubles and challenges, you simply wouldn’t know what good, smooth and awesome is.

There is no light without dark. So, don’t expect only light. Expect life to happen as a whole experience, with all the good things and not-so-good things.

Secondly, there is a little bit of bad in everything good and a little bit of good in everything bad.

You can turn a disaster into a blessing (with a redemptive narrative), a tragedy into a comedy, and a problem into an innovative solution. Only a movie with a good complication is a good movie.

On the other hand, soft times make soft people, too much chocolate will make you puke, and too much money can make you super lazy. There are no absolutes and perfections in life.

Almost everything has its pluses and minuses. With everything that you experience, everyone you meet, there are some good things and some things not to your liking.

Just make sure your mind doesn’t turn the whole Yin and Yang symbol into a big dark black hole because a small stain appears on your white canvas. If you let your mind escalate in such a negative direction, you’re definitely going to experience only misery in life.

You must become mindful of when your emotional response is out of proportion in all-or-nothing a way.

How to deal with all-or-nothing thinking – Thinking in shades of gray

First of all, you must become aware of the big difference between when something bad does happen to you and you have every right to feel anger, sadness or any other negative emotions, and when a small irritation or imperfection turns your mind into a drunken negative monkey that tries to hurt you and everybody around.

There’s a big difference between the following situations:

• After dating a person for a few months, you realize they’re not the person for you, that you don’t fit together very well and it’s time to break up. It’s okay to be sad, but you know it’s the right thing to do.
• You are dating for a few months and everything is going so well. You are crazy in love and happy, but then you have a small fight; or you find a small imperfection. For example, your music tastes differ. And then suddenly everything goes to nothing, you see only the dark in the person, your miserable love life, everything is so dark …
• You were dating for a few months, things went really well, you were crazy in love, but then s/he cheated on you. You were so angry and disappointed and it hurt so much. You decided to break up, because cheating is unacceptable to you.

It’s not hard to recognize the scenario in which all-or-nothing thinking is present. It’s the second one, of course.

The first step to evict the all-or-nothing thinking error is to mindfully recognize when your mind is going crazy and takes something from 100% straight to 0%, just because of a small imperfection.

The all-or-nothing mindset is a recipe for a miserable life. Don’t be trapped in your own unrealistic standards. Nobody is 100% right or 100% wrong.

Cognitive behavioral therapist David D. Burns, author of the book Feeling Good, recommends that you practice a technique called “Thinking in Shades of Gray”.

Try to evaluate a situation, person or anything that forces you into black-and-white thinking on a sliding scale from 0% to 100%. You will quickly realize that there aren’t many things that can be marked at 0%.

You can’t be everything and you can’t be nothing. We are all somewhere in between. And I like you as you are, you don’t have to be perfect.

Jumping to conclusions is one of the most common forms of negative thinking. The problem with this type of a cognitive distortion is that conclusions are in most cases negative; catastrophically negative.

You usually jump to a negative conclusion without any justifiable facts of the situation or reality. In the next step, you start torturing yourself with how unlucky you are.

The “Jumping-to-conclusions” mindset is like owning a crystal ball that predicts only misery. If you had such a crystal ball , what would you do with it? You would throw it immediately away, of course.

So there is not a single reason to keep such a negative way of thinking in your mind. There are two types of cognitive distortive thinking where you automatically jump to a negative conclusion:

1. Fortunetelling
2. Mind reading

Fortunetelling

The first type of jumping to conclusions is called fortunetelling. You anticipate that a specific situation will turn out badly, no matter what you do.

You convince yourself that a negative outcome is an already established fact. You arbitrarily predict a poor outcome for you. No other option is possible. Period.

When you jump to such a negative conclusion, you automatically become negative, depressed, anxious, sad or angry. Your mind is filled with negative thoughts that trigger severe negative emotions.

Consequently you suffer, because the outcome in your head is not the same as you wish it would be.

But what if I tell you that you very frequently jump to wrong conclusions. What if you’re making a typical fortuneteller error? You assume something will happen, but you only assume it.

You don’t know it. You actually have no idea whether your predictions are true or not.

Acting on a wrong assumption is the basis of all big fu*kups. And torturing yourself based on untested assumptions is the ugliest form of mistrust in yourself, life and your personal power.

Bad things do happen from time to time (even to good people), but not as often as your mind would like you to think. And even more importantly, there is zero benefit to giving yourself a hard time before having all the facts. Simply because you are probably wrong!

Let me give you a few examples of fortuneteller errors I made recently:

• I worked with a client who had some financial trouble. I was 100 % sure she will be late with the payment. I was even in a bad mood for a couple of hours because of it. She paid the invoice before the due date.
• I had a medical checkup for a health issue. I had a really bad feeling about it. I expected the worst. I was so sure about my intuition. Deep down I felt like the bad outcome is something I have to experience to learn from it. I was so moody for a couple of days before the checkup. The results of the exam were perfectly fine. But I was so sure.

There are many common forms of fortunetelling. An exam that you will fail even though you studied properly and prepared yourself, a parking spot that you will definitely not find, the new product that you’re about to launch and nobody is going to buy, the promotion that you will 100% not get, and so on.

With fortunetelling, you’re torturing yourself based on assumptions that your negative mind made up. It has nothing to do with reality, at least until you gather all the facts and get proper feedback.

And in 90 % of the situations, things that you worry about have nothing to do with reality.

Mind reading

Mind reading is the second form of negative thinking when we talk about jumping to conclusions. If fortunetelling is about situations that you falsely assume will turn negative, mind reading is about untested negative assumptions about people.

You assume people don’t like you, won’t respond positively to your suggestions and similar, even though your assumptions are only a negative construct of your mind.

With mind reading, you are determined that you know how others are feeling towards you, even if they never said or did anything to that effect.

In the end, you prefer to torture yourself in the negative belief rather than opening a conversation and figuring out what people really do think about you.

Let me give you a few common examples of mind reading:

• You assume that she will definitely turn you down, before you even ask her out.
• You assume that the client doesn’t want to work with you, before you even send an offer.
• You assume nobody will like an article you just wrote anyway.
• You assume that people are focused only on that one imperfection you have with your body.
• You assume that some group of people doesn’t like you and they make fun of you.

There are many other forms of mind reading. You believe people don’t respect you, that you’ll get automatically rejected or that others won’t respond positively to your needs. But the reality might be completely different.

You don’t know for real what others think about you until you ask them. From time to time, some people might just not like you. And there are always some haters present in everyone’s life, especially when you stand up for something.

But they can’t really hurt you, if you don’t let them. You always have the chance to focus on your supporters, and embrace and understand the haters. The only question is what you focus your mind on.

The ridiculousness of mind reading is that you make assumptions about people before you even realize. You have no idea what is the opinion of another person, you only build a negative construct in your mind to feed your negative thoughts and emotions.

You let your mind turn into your worst enemy. Wouldn’t you rather visualize positive things? Make sure your mind is an asset not a liability.

Why do people visit fortunetellers?

Fortunetelling is a big business. When your mind fantasizes about all the possible negative outcomes, you need to balance it somehow. You need reassurance that things are not that negative as your mind is picturing them for you.

Then you visit a fortuneteller and they tell you (hopefully) that everything is going to be okay, one way or another. And negative thoughts slowly fade away.

Finally, you can also see all the positive signs. Finally, you gain some trust in yourself and life. That’s why people most often visit fortunetellers.

They have a great mistrust in themselves and life, and consequently they look for external confirmation that things can turn out positively. That gives them hope, and hope is what fuels a positive outlook.

But having a fortuneteller is only a crutch with a short-term supporting effect. Your mind can go crazy again very soon and go back to dark interpretations of reality – by jumping to conclusions or any other cognitive distortion.

That’s why people most often need to visit the fortuneteller over and over again. To calm down their insecurities. And that can be quite expensive.

Consequently, a much better alternative is to slowly develop trust in yourself and life, build a superior life strategy, develop competences that match your challenges, and on top of that manage your mind properly. Once you learn to manage your mind, you don’t need external crutches anymore.

It’s time that you stop jumping to conclusions

You don’t need to visit a fortuneteller to gain reassurance in yourself or life. All you have to do is to make sure your mind is not a negative crystal ball that only sees misery in your future.

The best thing is that you can get rid of a big portion of anxiety and negativity, as long as you discipline your mind not to jump to conclusions. There are some simple exercises how you can achieve that.

1. Check the facts

The best thing to do, if possible, is to check the facts and see if reality matches the negative perception. You will realize that it does only sometimes, but most often doesn’t.

When you see the reality undistorted, you don’t see only negatives, but also positives in your life.

• You might get rejected from time to time, but there are many people who enjoy your company
• Your article might not go viral, but there are absolutely readers who appreciate it
• What about all the situations when you were lucky and found the parking spot before everyone else?

Check the facts if possible. And make sure you check all the facts.

Ask the person to grab a coffee with you. If you get rejected, find someone who is really your fit. Send an offer to a potential client. Send your resume to the company you want to work for. Publish that article. And so on. And do all these things several times before you draw any conclusions.

Don’t assume negative outcomes, if in reality you have no idea what will happen. Instead just do a small manageable step, gather the feedback and adjust if necessary.

Gather all the facts as soon as possible and stop torturing yourself with imaginary beliefs. Performing life experiments is a great way to manage insecurities and see uncertainty as a scientist whose job is to discover how reality really is.

2. Practice thought stopping

Every time your mind tries to take you to a dark place with a negative conclusion, stop it. Simply say “No!” straight back to your negative mind. Just say, “we don’t know that yet”.

Remind yourself that your assumptions are not based on real facts, but just on negative beliefs. Don’t let your mind to turn into your worst enemy. Stop it at the first negative thought.

In the beginning, you might have to do it hundreds of times daily. Your mind goes crazy and you say no. And again and again and again.

In the beginning, you have to be strong, and make sure that you don’t let your mind off the leash no matter what. You have to be strong and defend yourself and reality. And the reality is that you don’t know the outcome yet.

3. Remind yourself of past positive outcomes

An additional exercise you can do to reframe your thinking in a more positive way is to find proofs of how your mind was wrong in your past. Remind yourself of all the situations where you got a positive response, even though you anticipated a negative outcome.

A client said yes to your offer, a person positively responded to your invitation to go out, you got a lot of praise for something that you did, or things somehow turned out just fine when you assumed the worst.

Remind yourself that your mind can overanalyze things and focus on the negatives, and that you won’t let it do the same this time. That should absolutely calm you down.

From time to time, we all get some negative news, and in such situations you must act appropriately to minimize the risk and pain. But you need to get rid of the thinking that most situations in your life will turn negative.

4. Practice trusting yourself and life

The less you trust yourself and life, the more your mind jumps to negative conclusions. The less you trust yourself and life, the more you need external crutches that calm down your insecurities.

The best and most permanent solution to discard jumping to conclusions is to practice trusting yourself and life. You must believe deep down that you’re going to be okay, no matter what happens.

You must believe in your personal power that there is always a step forward you can make, there is always an alternative path to your goal, and there is a positive narrative to find in every negative situation.

Let me give you some examples of how to practice trusting yourself and life:

• List all the ways how you can adjust your strategy or alternative paths to your goal when you hear a “no” from somebody.
• Read forums to see what kind of positive things people found in tough situations similar to yours.
• Develop a new set of competences that better meet the challenges that life throws at you.
• Write down every single instance when your mind anticipated something bad based on false assumptions, and then the positive outcome happened. When you have dozens of such cases, you can slowly start to mistrust your negative mind and trust in yourself instead.

Unrealistic expectations – the other extreme

Constantly jumping to negative conclusions is a nasty form of negative thinking. It’s a very common way of making one’s life miserable. It takes some consistent work on your mindset to get rid of such negative self-fulfilling prophecy.

But while working on your mindset, you must be very careful not to go into another extreme; the extreme of having unrealistic expectations that everything will happen as you wish without any obstacles.

The point of dealing with your mindset and negative thoughts is to see reality as it is – and then accept it, build and follow a superior strategy based on it, and finally start living a happy and successful life by mastering yourself and life’s rules.

That means you don’t let your mind see only the negative, especially where there are no facts for it, but at the same time you also don’t sail away towards positive illusions.

From time to time, bad things do happen. Sometimes you do get rejected. Most often it takes a lot more hard work than anticipated when you go after your goals or try to learn something new. And there are always some obstacles on the path of life.

But much like there are obstacles on the road, so there are lucky breaks, progress and positive responses. Having realistic expectations and focusing on the positive, without jumping to any conclusions when you don’t have the facts, is the optimal way of thinking. Employ it!