Self-help books number in the thousands on bookstore shelves, and advice, proverbs, and apothegms about having a full and happy life abound, whether represented in a meme or stamped on a breakfast mug. However, most formulas for happiness are far from being effective because they do not take into account the enormous psychological diversity found in the human species.
However, a series of automatic thoughts have been identified that distort our perception of reality, making it less flattering. They are the closest thing to mental viruses that prevent happiness from flourishing in our mental field .
Some of the cognitive distortions (that is, misinterpretations of reality) that we should avoid as soon as they come our way are the following, as collected by Robert L. Leahy , Stephen JF Holland and Lata K. McGinn in Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders .
This manual is already an indispensable classic for treating the most common clinical problems found in mental health outpatient practice, offering the professional empirically supported treatments for seven common disorders : major depression, generalized anxiety, panic and agoraphobia, post-traumatic stress disorder , social phobia, specific phobia and obsessive compulsive disorder. Serving as ready-to-use treatment packages, the chapters describe basic cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) techniques and how to adapt them to each disorder.
- Read too much the mind of others . It occurs when we take for granted what others think of us without having too much evidence to back it up. It is natural that we all tend to seek acceptance from other people, because that partly shapes who we are. Even those who claim to go it alone don’t really, as Dean Burnett explains in his book The Idiot Brain : “The first thing an individual does when he doesn’t want to conform to normal conventions is to find another group identity to conform to instead. of those “. The problem arises when we not only care too much about what they think of us, but we tend to believe that they do it critically.
- Negative forecasts. The tendency to see the future dark or to be convinced that things will tend to get worse. Abusing negative future thinking can be counterproductive for reasons such as those warned by Jacques Lecomte in his book The world is going much better than you think! : “A time of denunciation can be useful, but when it is prolonged in excess, it tends to drag us towards catastrophic agony, towards a feeling of helplessness and, consequently, into immobility.”
- Catastrophism . Incline to think that, after a misfortune, we will be unable to move on. The evidence, however, points to just the opposite, as pointed out by George Loewenstein and David Schkade in their study Wouldn´t It Be Nice? Predicting Future Feelings .
- Labeling . The inclination to assign global negative traits to oneself or to other people, of the type “he is a bad person” or “I am not worth anything”, when in reality we are all a mixture of positive and negative traits and both will emerge more frequently depending on the circumstances.
- Unfair comparisons . It occurs when we focus on what others do well or better than us and compare it only with what we do badly or worse than others. In addition, we will biasedly seek evidence to confirm these ideas to reject any arguments or evidence to the contrary.
- Value judgment . It happens when we classify events, others, or ourselves in terms of good / bad or superior / inferior evaluations, when descriptions are often more nuanced.
- Repentance It occurs when we abuse regret (“I could have done better or I shouldn’t have done it”) instead of focusing on what we can do from now on. The cognitive distortion is exacerbated when we add emotional reasoning (“I feel like this, therefore this is so”) and questions such as “what if my life was different?
