You should read this!

Happy Friday friend!

I hope you’ve had a great week!

How did last week’s email land with you?

Which of the four cognitive distortions discussed stood out?

What changes have you made this week that helped you frame or think about things differently?

What new action steps or habits did you commit to?

Something?

Anything?

Take a pause…

If the answer to those last two questions is a resounding “no”, notice that.

It’s something I notice a lot with clients, and yep, myself too. Although less than I used to.

You read these emails because you a) find the topic interesting, and/or b) at some level want to make changes in your life to move things, or keep moving things, in a positive direction at a pace that energizes you.

The key word there, is move.

Movement.

Action.

Doing.

Reading is not movement.

Reading is the kindling to the fire, it does not light the fire.

The spark is in the doing.

From experience, there’s one word that gets in the way of doing more than any other, and it’s the first of our second batch of cognitive distortions.

Should

Let’s dive in!

1 - Shoulding

If there’s one word I hear more than any other that gets in people’s way, it’s should.

“I should get up earlier.”

“I should get the veg instead of the fries.”

“I should be able to win this match.”

The guilt, anxiety and fear that words like should, ought or must, drive into thoughts and statements is palpable, contributing to reduced autonomy and choice.

As discussed last week in Understanding Cognitive Distortions, negative thinking patterns like shoulding become automatic very quickly unless they’re acknowledged and intentionally addressed, and can lead to internal feelings of frustration and failure, creating an escalating cycle of stress and the potential for depression.

So what to do?

Two things.

Number one. 

Reframe your language.

“Semantics!”

Oh no, oh no. Language is the brush with which you paint your reality.

Words matter!

Reframe shoulds, oughts or musts to can, choose, or want.

I should work out today, becomes I can workout today.

I ought to study, becomes I choose to study.

I must eat more veg, becomes I want to eat more veg.

No-one’s got a gun to your head.

If something’s a priority for you, take ownership of it.

Number 2.

Set realistic intentions.

Coming back to all-or-nothing thinking from last week.

There are a lot of positive options between not working out at all, and working out 5 days a week. A LOT!

Build yourself the shallowest on-ramp possible to start to shift momentum, and re-commit to that intention, every day.

Most of us don’t even hoist the sail when we set off each morning. We raise anchor and hope for the best.

Choose a word or phrase every morning that represents your true north for the day.

See it, be it.

2 - Compare and despair

Comparison involves unfairly comparing our achievements and qualities to the achievements and qualities of others without considering the nature of, and reasons for, our individual strengths and weaknesses.

Sadly, social media’s made this a far bigger issue than it used to be.

But it’s not comparison as a base concept that’s the primary issue.

For much of human history, comparison would’ve been a helpful tool.

In their small, close-knit communities, it was useful for our ancestors to be able to gauge their capabilities against others in the tribe.

They knew each other intimately, had knowledge of each other’s attributes or lack thereof, and had likely witnessed, and contributed to, the process of one another’s development.

When that’s the process - and maybe you’ve seen this in sports or work teams you’ve been a part of - you grow together, as a collective. Some are stronger in leadership, others in physical attributes, or problem solving, or communication, or…and on and on. We build groups of complimentary attributes, and the whole rises.

Times have clearly changed. And the biggest issue here is that we’re mostly comparing ourselves to people we haven’t the foggiest idea of anything about.

Even those we do have more insight into, friends and relatives, we get but a snapshot of their lived experience, and usually the edited highlights.

It’s a recipe for anxiety, depression, shame, envy, unhelpful self-criticism, declining self-worth and plummeting confidence.

What to do?

Set your compass points.

“No wind blows in favor of a ship without direction.” ~ Seneca

Unintentional nautical theme flowing today.

Let’s roll with it.

The points of your compass are your values. What make you, you.

And they’re the only place comparison holds any worth. Not comparison with other people’s values, but how you’re showing up in service to your own, day to day.

So write down your core values (3 - 6). Somewhere you’ll see them everyday. And score yourself against them as often as you can fully reflect on them.

Daily, weekly.

Often enough to mark a reliable trend.

3 - Catastrophizing

Catastrophising’s perhaps the most intense of the cognitive distortions and one of the most correlated with high levels of anxiety, unnecessary stress, and depression.

When we catastrophize, we overestimate negative outcomes and underestimate our own coping skills and ability to adapt. Consequently, catastrophizers experience feelings of helplessness around their perceived inability to manage potential threats.

Catastrophizing’s a two step process, in 1) the prediction of a negative outcome, and 2) jumping to the conclusion that if that negative outcome were to happen, it would be an insurmountable personal catastrophe.

As with most cognitive distortions, it often starts small and builds in momentum and significance over time, which is why’s it’s SO important to be bringing your attention to these things as soon as you can.

What can be passed off as a slip of the tongue initially, can swiftly escalate into a way of being punctuated by endless what-ifs that would have you avoiding any and all risk, turning down opportunities, overlooking the facts and becoming a shell of the person you want to be.

It’s boiling frog syndrome.

What can you do?

The first thing to do is to call yourself out. Catastrophizing typically involves the absence of fact.

Planning ahead is important, but if you’re actively predicting worst-case scenarios in the absence of fact, then you’re wasting a boat load of cognitive energy and putting yourself in a mental space of angst and worry.

You build your own mental home, take responsibility for it.

If there are aspects of your concerns that are rooted in reality, then facing your worries head on is key. Don’t give them more power than they deserve by putting them off and letting that monster grow.

The most efficient way I’ve found for people to do that is to conduct a regular (weekly, bi-weekly, monthly) “if-then” analysis.

If X (worry/ barrier/ concern) happens

Then Y (what will you do?)

Catastrophizing focuses on the problem, shift your attention to the solution.

Problem solve.

Take control.

4 - Fortune Telling

Similar to catastrophizing, fortune telling is the tendency to jump to conclusions with a high degree of certainty. While catastrophizing is steeped in worry and anxiety around an imagined future event, fortune telling applies to daily events too.

“I’m going to find today’s workout really hard.”

“I’m going to struggle with that project.”

“It’s Friday, I’m going to want to eat garbage tonight.”

Fortune telling ignores the fact that the outcome is not yet determined and discounts the potential for positive outcomes.

Whenever we predict or forecast into the future, we reduce our agency and power in the present.

You’ve likely noticed that theme among most of these cognitive distortions. That the reason they can be so destructive is that they take us out of the driving seat of our own lives and out of our autonomy to take action in the now.

Most if not all of these thinking errors result in a deep sense of despair, depression, and anxiety.

At the core is hopelessness.

The gnawing belief that we’re not capable of taking the steps we need and want to take in life.

Know that 99 times out of 100, that’s a fallacy, and guiding our attention away from these distortions, away from past and future, and towards this moment, is where your power, agency, autonomy and genius lie.

The most empowering thing you can do in response to fortune telling, is to identify the steps you can take in the moment.

To do that most effectively, I like to implement a process of back-casting. Literally the exact opposite of forecasting.

We all have goals, written or imagined, formal or informal, for where we want to be a month, a year or a decade from now. Craft that vision, and then walk it back into the present.

A goal without steps to achieve it is just a dream.

And while goals can and should be highly motivating, their primary function is as the end point from which to identify the necessary steps along the way, walking backwards from the goal, into the “now” you and the action you can take today.

———————————————————————————

Alrighty. Eight cognitive distortions, how’re they might be getting in your way, and at least eight strategies for getting beyond them.

One thing I’ve noticed that’s consistent across particularly ambitious, motivated folk, is the tendency to judge themselves for falling into some of these thought traps.

High awareness, low self-compassion.

These won’t go away overnight, maybe never. That’s not where the power lies. The power lies in noticing whenever they do come up, and letting go of the judgement.

Judgement is precisely what anchors us to the thoughts in the first place.

So instead of “I shouldn’t still be having these thoughts,” accept that thoughts are something you have, not something you are.

In love and health,

Alex