Distortion Spotting Exercise

How cognitive therapy teaches us to correct our own biased thinking

Have you noticed that other people often exhibit quite biased thinking? Angry people seem to be looking for more reasons to become enraged. Anxious people seem at times to exaggerate the dangers they face. Depressed people seem to view everything in an overly-negative way, and not to be able to see the positives. The worst thing is that they don’t seem to realize they’re doing it! What if I told you that you probably do this as well? We all exhibit biases in our thinking sometimes but we don’t notice because, well, because we’re biased.

There are things we can do to address this problem, though. One of the fundamental techniques of cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), involves learning to spot biases in your own thinking — we call these “cognitive distortions” in research or just “thinking errors” when speaking informally. You can view the list of cognitive distortions I’m going to give you below as consisting of various labels for common biases that we all exhibit from time to time in our thinking.

The central premise of all cognitive therapy is what we could call the cognitive model of emotion, which simply means that our beliefs shape our emotions a lot more than we normally assume. It’s often explained by quoting the Stoic Handbook of Epictetus: “It’s not events that upset us but rather our opinions about them.” Cognitive therapy therefore sets out to identify errors in our reasoning, and to correct them using a form of Socratic questioning. The therapist isn’t really correcting the client’s thinking errors by asking these questions. Rather the client is helped to learn how to identify and correct his or her own errors. They are encouraged to continue doing this between sessions, and even, to some extent, after the therapy has ended.

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In the first book he wrote on psychotherapy, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders (1976), for instance, Aaron T. Beck, said:

This new approach—cognitive therapy—suggests that the individual’s problems are derived largely from certain distortions of reality based on erroneous premises and assumptions. […] Regardless of their origin, it is relatively simple to state the formula for treatment: The therapist helps a patient to unravel his distortions in thinking and to learn alternative, more realistic ways to formulate his experiences. — Beck, 1976, p. 2, italics added

Cognitive therapy has many different techniques. The one we’re going to explain in this article is called spotting thinking errors. We can identify common types of faulty reasoning, similar to logical fallacies, which research shows are associated with emotional problems, such as severe anxiety and depression.

Certain types of belief tend to be associated with certain problems. For example, people who suffer from severe anxiety tend to overestimate the severity and probability of certain perceived threats. People who have problems with anger tend to blame others severely for transgressing some moral rule, jump to conclusions about their motives, and often underestimate the risks associated with aggression. Depressed individuals often hold excessively negative beliefs about themselves, and have a negative bias toward life in general.

Learning to spot our own faulty reasoning and biases can be a very powerful way of helping ourselves. Just by noticing our thinking errors, and realizing that they are errors, we gain a more detached and objective perspective on our own thinking, which we sometimes call “cognitive distancing”. We now know that’s one of the simplest and most powerful processes in psychotherapy, and it can benefit you every day in self-improvement as well. In the next section, I’ll list some common thinking errors, and then we’ll look at several different exercises, which can help you to spot them, and gain cognitive distance.

What Thinking Errors?

There are lots of lists of common thinking errors to be found in books on CBT. Different authors use different lists of errors, some may contain 4-5 types, others as many as twenty or more. Thinking errors typically overlap. Most people don’t experience all of them at once, though.

In his earliest book on psychotherapy, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders, 1976, Beck lists four main categories of common cognitive distortions.

• Extreme thinking, this encompasses many types of exaggeration such as what therapists call “catastrophizing”, which means overestimating the severity of a threat, or blowing things out of proportion. Beck also uses this term to refer to thinking in terms of polarized extremes, which we tend to call “black and white” or “all or nothing” thinking.

• Selective abstraction, sometimes called “selective thinking” (a bit like “selective hearing” or “selective memory”), this refers to taking information out of context by ignoring, or possibly dismissing, relevant facts. It’s arguably quite fundamental, and perhaps underlies several other errors.

• Arbitrary inference, this refers to jumping to conclusions prematurely, perhaps based on unfounded assumptions, or by making leaps such as “fortune telling”, in which we presume things about the future without sufficient evidence, or “mind reading”, in which we jump to conclusions about what other people are thinking.

• Overgeneralization, this is another very common form of error, closely related to selective abstraction, in which we assume that something true in one context is true more generally, sometimes this can be called “always or never” thinking, and it’s also the basis of many stereotypes and prejudices.

As you can see, we can distinguish between different variations of most of these errors, and there are many others we can add to the list. There’s nothing to stop you from identifying others and choosing to work on those, if you want. It’s often helpful, though, to analyze your thinking in order to spot what the most prominent errors might be in your own emotions. Below are several exercises, which will help you work on your cognitive distortions in a variety of different ways.

Thinking of Examples

Clark and Beck (2011) suggest completing a worksheet in which you think of several examples of each thinking error. For instance, from your recent experience, particularly situations where you’ve struggled with your emotions, can you find several specific examples of each of the following:

• Extreme thinking. Do you ever exaggerate anything or blow things out of proportion? Do you feel you sometimes view things too much in a black-and-white or all-or-nothing way? (Give some examples.)

• Selective abstraction. Do you ever focus too much on some aspects of the situation and ignore others, as if you’re looking at events through a microscope or magnifying glass? Do you sometimes take certain events too much out of context? (Give some examples.)

• Arbitrary inference. Do you ever jump prematurely to any conclusions about a situation? Do you ever make any mistaken assumptions about what others are thinking or how events will turn out in the future? (Give some examples.)

• Overgeneralization. Do you ever find yourself making sweeping generalizations, such as telling yourself something is always or never the case? (Give some examples.)

As you can see, these questions are just a rough guide. Try your best to identify the sort of situations where you may be prone to making these or similar thinking errors. In the exercises below, you’re going to focus more narrowly on a specific situation and look at the thinking errors you may have exhibited, and how they may affect your emotions and behavior.

Analyzing a Situation

A more common exercise in CBT would be to pick a recent time when you’ve experienced a problem, such as anxiety, and to ask yourself whether your thinking in that situation exhibited any of the thinking errors above.

1. What was the situation? Can you describe it in a few words? Where and when did it happen?

2. What emotions were you feeling at the time?

3. What thoughts were going through your mind?

4. What actions did you take in response? What did you actually do?

5. Spot thinking errors:

   1. What, if anything, might have been too extreme about your thinking during that situation? Do you think you may have exaggerated anything?

   2. What examples, if any, of selective thinking, taking things out of context, or overlooking details, might you identify on that occasion?

   3. What conclusions, if any, did you jump to in that situation, without enough evidence?

   4. What overgeneralizations, if any, might you have been making?

Once you’ve identified the sort of thinking errors that might be causing you the most problems, you can start keeping an eye out for them in general, using the next exercise.

Counting your Errors

This is really one of the easiest ways of applying cognitive therapy. If you can learn to keep a tally of your upsetting thoughts, that alone will often tend to reduce their frequency, intensity, and duration. For instance, Beck et al. 2005 describe counting automatic thoughts as a form of cognitive distancing.

Counting allows the patient to distance himself from his thoughts, gives him a sense of mastery over them, and helps him to recognize their automatic quality, rather than accepting them as an accurate reflection of external reality. — Beck et al., 2005, .p 195

There are several variations of this technique. For example, you could keep a written tally or use a tally counter, of the sort used by golfers and doormen.

Beck et al. mention these could be thoughts exhibiting specific types of cognitive distortion, such as catastrophizing. After noticing it, they advise accepting the thought rather than fighting and, and merely saying to yourself “There’s another fearful thought. I’ll just count it and let it go.” For instance, you might keep track of how many times each day you catch yourself exaggerating things, whether in your thoughts or speech, or how often, each day, you exhibit a negative bias in your thinking.

Often when people start doing an exercise like this, they notice an initial increase in the frequency of the troubling thoughts. That’s normal. Over the course of 2-3 days, though, if you’re consistent, you’ll usually find the thoughts occurring less often, and you’ll probably start to experience them as more boring, as if you’re viewing them from a more detached perspective.

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Exercise: Spotting Distortions

This exercise is longer and more in-depth so I’ve left it until last. You’ll gain more benefit from it if you’ve already completed some of the exercises above. You should already be more familiar with the idea of cognitive distortions and the experience of spotting them and gaining distance from them, by viewing them in a detached and objective manner.

Relax and focus on a specific situation where you’ve experienced anxiety, anger, or some other problem. If you can, imagine it as if it is happening right now.  Your aim is to identify any problems or errors of thinking that might distort your perception of that situation.  Fundamentally, you may find it becomes useful to evaluate whether your current viewpoint on the situation is 100% logical, accurate, and constructive, or whether you could potentially see things differently. 

So, concerning the situation you’ve chosen:  

1. What, if anything, might you be falsely presupposing about things? 

2. What, if anything, might be distorted by your feelings?

3. What might you be dismissing or discounting unnecessarily?

4. What might you be looking at too much in all-or-nothing or black-and-white terms?

5. What might you be falsely assuming about other people?

6. What conclusions might you be jumping to about the future?

7. What false assumptions might you be making about yourself in regard to this matter?

8. What might you be making overgeneralizations about?

9. What, if anything, are you exaggerating?

10. What, if anything, are you trivialising?

11. What unreasonable demands, if any, might you be imposing upon yourself?

12. Are you placing any illogical demands on other people?

13. Are you imposing any irrational expectations on life?

14. What, if anything, might you be mistaken about?

15. What might you be ignoring or overlooking?

16. Who, if anyone, are you blaming excessively?

17. What, if anything, are you taking too personally?

18. What might you be misinterpreting about things?

19. What evidence is there that might contradict your view of the situation?

20. What might you be thinking about in an illogical way?

21. Are you contradicting yourself in any way?

22. What might be self-defeating or counter-productive about your attitude to things?

23. Are you unfairly labelling anything about yourself, others, or events?

Review Questions

• What have you learned from contemplating these questions?

• What would be a more rational and helpful way of thinking about that situation?

• What advice would you give someone else faced with a similar problem?

• What else can be done now to begin changing things for the better?

• What else do you have to report about the experience of doing this exercise?

Conclusion

I hope you found those exercises of interest. Think of it a bit like going to the gym — don’t expect a miracle cure. In fact, the assumption that if you’re not cured immediately then it’s a waste of time, which we often find with depressed clients, but also in many other cases, is an example of one of the thinking errors we mentioned earlier: all-or-nothing thinking.

Please comment below with your thoughts, and particularly any examples of other types of common thinking errors you consider worth mentioning, or any interesting examples from your own life. Remember, that cognitive therapy techniques like these are about a kind of learning, so they usually take a little practice, and reflection.