Last week, we discussed self-compassion and how it’s one of five habits that can help you be fabulous at regulating your emotions. Today, we’re focusing on the third habit: cognitive restructuring, a powerful technique for reducing negative thinking patterns and the stress, anxiety, or other emotions and moods they create.

The idea is that by changing your automatic thoughts to make them more realistic, you can feel better more often. Cognitive restructuring has many practical benefits, including improved communication, less procrastination, and more confidence—not to mention lower anxiety and stress.

For this to work, you should be aware of cognitive distortions, the mental filters responsible for forming and maintaining negative thoughts. Cognitive distortions lead to unrealistic, exaggerated, and often inaccurate thinking, resulting in substantial negative emotions.

🔎 TL/DR: Common Cognitive Distortions

Here are several unhelpful things people think that can lead to feeling down:

🤔 Mind reading: Assuming what another person thinks without evidence supporting it.

🌌 Overgeneralization: Drawing broad conclusions without sufficient evidence (this often involves using words like “always” and “never”).

💥 Magnification: Exaggerating your mistakes or imperfections, often leading to thinking of them as catastrophic.

🤏 Minimization: Dismissing your strengths and positive attributes.

😭 Emotional reasoning: Making decisions based on an emotion or mood rather than evidence.

🔳 Black and white thinking: Evaluating things exclusively in terms of extreme categories.

🙋 Personalization: Assuming excessive responsibility, especially for things mostly or entirely outside your control.

🔮 Fortune telling: Imagining a future based on limited or no evidence and conjuring up worst-case scenarios by making assumptions about how events unfold.

🏷 Labeling: Describing yourself or others in one extreme way, usually negatively.

🥴 Should statements: Motivating yourself with self-talk about what you should and should not do, which sets up false expectations around uncertain events.

💡 Sol Bites: 5 Steps to Retrain Your Thoughts

The trick to turning things around is being mindful of when negativity starts creeping into your thoughts.

🎞️ Video Bite

In this video, hear what Sol TV Founding Creator Marta Pap, a reiki master and one of Toronto's leading energy healing and chakra balancing authorities, has to say about cognitive behavioral therapy. (CBT)

She shares her insights on how CBT can help you change your thinking patterns and behaviors, and how you can use these techniques to reduce your anxiety in the moment.

💡 Words of wisdom

Along the Same Lines…

We love you,
Mona & The Sol TV Team ❤️