Breaking Free from the Chains of All-or-Nothing Thinking: Embracing Balance and Banishing Anxiety - Video Transcript

Hey, everyone, I'm Kristen, the anxiety therapist. Today I'm going to be talking about polarized thinking, which is a type of cognitive distortion. That's just fancy terminology for thinking errors. Cognitive pertains to thinking and our thought processes, and then distortions mean something is distorted, right? There's an error, something is inaccurate in some way.

So when we have these cognitive distortions, it's usually from repeated and habitual errors in thinking. We all have thinking errors sometimes, right? Maybe you misinterpreted what somebody said to you one time and had to get clarification or it elicited a certain type of feeling, and you know, "oh, that's normal." But when it comes to cognitive distortions, that's when these thinking errors are pervasive and they really cause us to interpret events in a negative way and to view reality in a wrong or irrational way.

And this reinforcement of these ways of thinking can lead to anxiety, depression, etc., because they become our automatic thoughts, right? The more we think these negative thoughts, the more they become part of the wiring in our brain and they become our automatic thoughts.

So the one I want to talk about today is polarized thinking. This is sometimes referred to as all-or-nothing thinking, black-and-white thinking. And basically, you are looking at things as being on one end of the spectrum or another. You're sort of operating at one extreme or the other. There's very hard to find that middle ground or that gray area. And you might use words like "always," "never," "everything," "nothing," things like that.

If you're engaging in polarized thinking a lot, an example of this would be the belief that if you aren't perfect, then you're a complete failure. Neither of those are probably true, and it's likely that the reality lies somewhere in the middle, right? Maybe you have certain strengths and you've done really well in certain things or in certain areas of your life, and then some things you didn't do so well on or maybe you even failed a test or something of that nature, but it's not one or the other. It's not an either-or type of scenario.

We also get caught up in this thinking when we think things are either good or bad. And often we can experience some rigidity in thinking that the way we do something is right.  It's the only way to do it. Right? And so if somebody does something differently, we perceive that as being the wrong way when, in reality, it's just different.

One thing that's helpful to overcome these cognitive distortions and polarized thinking, in particular, is to really start paying attention to your thoughts. And if there is something that evokes a strong emotion, analyze it to see if you are engaging in polarized thinking and see how you might be able to think about that situation differently.

So, that's just one of several cognitive distortions. I plan to do a video for each. So stay tuned for some other ones. But I hope you found this helpful, and if so, subscribe to my YouTube channel, and I will see you next week. Take care.