The concept comes from Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive therapy, and is the backbone of CBT. The basic idea: the mind uses shortcuts to process quickly, and under emotional load those shortcuts systematise in the direction of the mood.
The commonest:
- All-or-nothing thinking — total success or total failure, nothing between.
- Overgeneralisation — one event becomes "always" or "never".
- Mind reading — you assume what the other person thinks and act as if you knew.
- Catastrophising — jumping to the worst outcome and treating it as the likeliest.
- Personalisation — assuming someone's reaction is about you.
- Filtering — retaining only the negative element of a whole.
- Emotional reasoning — "it feels true, therefore it is true."
The work isn't labelling them correctly but testing them: what evidence exists, what equally plausible alternative exists, what actually happened last time.