7 Ways Your Thoughts May Be Lying to You |
Most of us assume our emotions are direct responses to what's happening around us. Something bad happens, we feel bad. Something good happens, we feel good. Simple cause and effect.
But that's not how emotions actually work. Between every environmental trigger and every emotion, there's a middleperson: your thoughts. Your interpretation of what happened, what it means, and what's going to happen next.
These distortions are thinking traps. I call them emotional amplifiers: the thought patterns that take reasonable concern and crank it up to paralyzing dread. The good news? Once you learn to spot them, you can question them, and your emotions naturally recalibrate.
Here are seven ways your thoughts may be lying to you:
1. All-or-nothing thinking. You see situations in black and white with no middle ground. "If I don't get everything I want, this is a complete failure." This makes partial success impossible and sets you up to feel defeated even when you've made real progress.
2. Overgeneralization. You take one event and extend........