Six Common Thinking Patterns that Feed Depression

1)         All-or-Nothing Thinking

The first thinking pattern that feed depression is all or nothing thinking. With this cognitive error the world and self are viewed as either all good or all bad. There is no gray. You are a success or a total failure. Your life is either good and worth living or completely miserable and worthless, with nothing in between. Interestingly enough, the people I know who tend to commit this thinking error, at least in the context of depression, rarely experience the all good side of the equation. Theoretically, at least in a fair universe, the all good and all bad would be spread around equally. Some days you would feel like the best employee ever and other days you would feel like the worst. But rarely does it work that way. If the all good side of the pendulum is experienced, it is short lived. Most of the time the person is stuck in the all bad camp, which fuels a depressed mood.

Much of the time this all-or-nothing thinking gets expressed in the form of perfectionism. The person believes or feels that he has to be perfect. If he is perfect then he gets to experience being all good. One minor slip up, however, drops below the perfectionistic standard and is experienced as total and complete failure. Not being perfect uncovers a damaged self-concept that feels less than and worthless. The drive towards perfectionism is the person’s attempt to cover up and keep at bay this wounded self.

You can see, however, why perfectionism is problematic. You’re setting yourself up for the experience of failure, which will only confirm the negative views about self. It’s impossible to live and perform perfectly. And there are so many areas of life where measuring performance is highly subjective. How, for example, do you measure your performance as a spouse or a friend? In these domains perfection is something elusive and unattainable. But even in those areas that do lend themselves to measurement, such as grades in school or a performance review at work, you can’t always get a perfect score. Ultimately, you have to change the underlying assumptions that give birth to perfectionism and all-or-nothing thinking.

A graduate student I worked with was highly perfectionistic and suffered from the all-or-nothing thinking style. In her mind, only a 95% or higher was acceptable. Anything less and she was overwhelmed with a sense of failure and panic. We used her goal-oriented personality to chip away at the perfectionism. We framed success as striving to be average. As a treatment intervention, she approached her courses with the goal of mediocrity. She was to be the good-enough student. Each morning she uttered the humorous mantra, “Today I am going to be the best mediocre student I can be.” This approach allowed her to diffuse the perfectionism supporting the all-or-nothing thinking. She also discovered that her feelings of failure were highly exaggerated. There were times when she was convinced that her grades were plummeting and that she would be kicked out of the program. But her fears were never realized. At the end of the day her grades ended up looking very similar but she got there as a more balanced and content person.

2)   Overgeneralization

Another thinking pattern that feeds depression is overgeneralization. With overgeneralization you take one data point and make a global statement about your person or life, as if this one event speaks to “the way things are.” I had worked several months with a client who had a driving phobia. His greatest fear was having a panic attack and passing out while driving on the freeway. After two months of treatment he was back on the road with only mild anxiety symptoms. Once in a while, however, the anxiety would be more pronounced. It wasn’t debilitating anxiety but it was unpleasant and more than he found acceptable. He was still able to drive and successfully manage the episode by using the tools he learned in therapy. But when referring to such experiences, which were becoming less frequent, he would say statements like “I will never be able to drive without panicking.” The recent anxious event not only became exaggerated in his mind but it also spoke to a concrete fate that could not be changed. He thought to himself, I am doomed to be a highly anxious person. This is a depressing thought. But it didn’t reflect reality. He needed to work on seeing and holding on to the successes and the other data points that did not conform to his negative view. Overgeneralization is closely related to the next cognitive distortion.

3)   Confirmation Bias

With confirmation bias people see what they want to see. A filter is erected in the mind that is on the lookout for data that supports an underlying theory. A successful female executive grew up in a family where she was regularly “brought down to size.” Because of her parents own immaturity and woundedness, my client was never allowed to be appropriately big in the world. It was never okay for her to be in the spotlight or be celebrated. Instead her academic and athletic achievements, which were many, were experienced as a threat. Her gain was their loss. Under the guise of not wanting her to have a “big head” they made sarcastic remarks, relationally withdrew and shifted attention to the younger siblings. As a result the client internalized a powerful belief. “Whenever something good happens I get knocked down to size.” So when something good did happen she felt anxious and depressed, expecting to be knocked down at any moment. In an attempt to remove herself from the unbearable anticipation of the forthcoming attack that could not be identified, she was prone to generating situations that elicited the punishment she was expecting. It was her way of “getting it over with.”

When she had the experience of being unfairly “kicked” she would say, “When I feel good about my life something bad always happens.” In this statement she is skipping over all the other times, which are numerous, where nothing bad happens following a success or positive life event. This is the confirmation bias. It is latching onto data that fits your theory. An important part of therapy was helping her see how the depressive side screen was drawing her in with this historical vulnerability of expecting the good to be spoiled.

4)   Jumping to Conclusions

Suppose you are walking down the street in your neighborhood. On the other side of the street you see a friend walking towards you. As he approaches, you say hello but he doesn’t respond. Your friend keeps his head down and keeps walking. What conclusions do you draw from your friend’s behavior? If ten people experienced this event you would get ten different responses. Some would say, “He doesn’t want to be my friend anymore” or “He must be mad at me.” For others it might be something about the friend’s personality: “I always knew he was a jerk”. Other interpretations might be that he didn’t hear the greeting or is preoccupied with recent news and is not in an emotional space to interact. The possibilities are limitless. The take away here is that many of the events we experience are blank slates upon which we can project our fears and personal conclusions about self and the world. Be careful not to buy into the negative interpretations scrolling across the depressive side screen. Ask yourself, “What other interpretations might there be?”

5)   Emotional Reasoning

“I feel like a bad person.” One of the hallmarks of childhood trauma, whether it be physical or emotional, is the sense that at your core you are a bad or “toxic” person. It’s almost as if the child absorbs the badness of the environment into her person. It provides an explanation to the young mind as to why she is being punished. I am being treated this way because I am bad. When she leaves the neglectful or abusive home she doesn’t leave the feeling of being inherently bad behind. She carries it into the workplace. She carries it into every significant relationship. To one degree or another the feeling of being a bad person lurks in the background. And with it comes a fear that if others get too close they will run into this unlovable part of self and reject her, so even her closest relationships are kept at a safe distance. In addition, because she is “bad” she is not worthy of good things. And sometimes it goes further, where she feels worthy of bad things and punishment and may allow herself to be mistreated because it fits with the view of self.

This is but one example of emotional reasoning, where the feeling inside you makes it so. The feeling becomes reality, becomes your fate. All of the side screens we have reviewed will generate different feelings inside you. But you need to remember that a feeling is just a feeling. Your emotional experience does not necessarily speak to reality. The feelings spinning off the depressive side screen cannot be trusted. Most of the time you will be feeling something about your person or about your life that is the opposite of what is true. It is a lie. As I am writing this, for example, I am thinking about the clients in my practice who feel that their very essence is “bad.” Every person coming to mind, without exception, is loving and kind. They are good people. Others who know them would be shocked to learn that they carry feelings of being a bad person because it’s so far from the truth.

6)   Personalization

At the core of depression is the overwhelming sense of being a failure. Part of what feeds this belief is assuming too much responsibility for the things that go wrong. We refer to this as personalization, where negative events are connected back to self. Either you are directly responsible or the universe has your number and is out to get you. If your spouse is in a bad mood it is automatically because of something you did. On a weekend getaway if your friends are not having a thrilling experience it’s your fault. If the family dog develops a medical condition you are responsible because you could have exercised the dog more and been more vigilant about his health. Or sometimes it is less about responsibility and more about being singled out. You’re under the impression that life treats you differently than other people. If your car breaks down, you throw your hands up in the air with the statement, “Why does this kind of thing always happen to me?”

This cognitive distortion, when taken to the extreme, can veer into the realm of magical thinking or a kind of negative omnipotence where one’s private, internal experience is the cause of or connected to misfortune. One therapy client felt responsible for the death of a loved one because in an angry moment, at the age of ten, he had the fleeting thought, “I wish she were dead.” Months later when the aunt died he felt responsible, that somehow his angry wish had caused her death. It was a secret and a burden he carried for close to forty years.

Summary

If you struggle with depression there is a good chance you’re buying into one or more cognitive distortion. Start watching your thought life, while holding in mind the thinking errors common to depression we reviewed:

• All-or-nothing thinking
• Overgeneralization
• Confirmation bias
• Jumping to conclusions
• Emotional reasoning
• Personalization