15 Thought Traps We Get Stuck In

Have you ever become so stuck in your thoughts, that you can’t see the world any other way?

Put it this way: your whole life, you have been taught there is a right way to do things. When someone suggests an alternate method, or failure, you panic and think, “That’s not possible”. That’s black and white thinking.

Or maybe your head is racing with worse case scenarios – you expect your relationship to break up, your job to go wrong, or your health to go downhill. This is called “Fortune Telling”, a cognitive distortion that has you predict the future with no evidence, and it can come with a hefty side of ‘Overgeneralization,” when you make a conclusion based on one negative event or moment.

Cognitive distortions, or thought traps, impact everyone.  We all have our ‘blind spots’ when it comes to self-awareness and perception, which is why having a counsellor, healthy community and mentors is important. Without this insight, we can miss the thought traps that develop, and they become routine for our brain. We may have developed some of these thought traps to feel safe or survive. But over time, they can affect our mental wellbeing, our quality of life and our relationships. By challenging these thoughts, we can rewire our brains.

The blog My Mind Peelings has created a fantastic infographic that lists 15 common thought traps people experience, based on the work of David Burns. Read more about them in the infographic below and find out more in their original blog here. Do any thought traps stand out to you?

• Polarized Thinking

• Mental Filtering

• Overgeneralization

• Jumping to Conclusions

• Personalization

• Blaming

• Labelling

• Always Be Right

• Should Statements

• Emotional Reasoning

• Control Fallacies

• Fallacy of Change

• Fallacy of Fairness

• Heaven’s Reward Fallacy