Disqualifying the Positive

This is an extreme form of all-or-nothing thinking in which we filter out all the positive evidence about our performance, and only attend to the negative. It is all-or-nothing thinking, without the "all"! This cognitive distortion will produce automatic thoughts that reinforce negative feelings and explain away positive ones. If you've ever tried to argue someone out of a bad mood, you've probably seen this cognitive distortion from the outside. If you've ever been in a bad mood yourself, you may have seen it from the inside. Usually people who are caught up in this cognitive distortion are genuinely depressed about something, but it may be something that has no obvious connection with the topic at hand. I was going over an essay with a student who had gotten responses from three other students to a working draft of his essay. Our conversation went something like this:

STUDENT: I think I should just throw this out and start over. It's trash. Look at what Cheri said about it.
ME: Well, yes, she did beat up on it pretty well. But Bob, who also read it, seemed to like it.
STUDENT: Yeah, but he was just trying to be nice.
ME: How do you know that?
STUDENT: Oh, you know, people try to say nice things, even if it's really just junk, because they don't want to hurt your feelings.
ME: Well, that obviously isn't true of Cheri. But, OK, if you want to start over, do you have another topic in mind?
STUDENT: No. Well, I did, sort of, but it's no good either. They'd trash it just like this one. I could never get enough evidence to convince her.

Someone who is disqualifying the positive can't discuss a subject rationally because he is using a double standard. Negative evidence, no matter how weak or irrelevant, counts. Positive evidence, no matter how strong or persuasive, can be explained away. As it turned out, the student in the above conversation had just broken up with his girlfriend and was feeling very low. But this sort of automatic thought doesn't make any more sense when you're sad than it does when you're happy. The "logic" behind it goes something like this: Things are bad, so why not make them worse?

Link: http://daphne.palomar.edu/jtagg/disqual.htm

All-or-Nothing Thinking

We engage in all-or-nothing thinking when we accept automatic thoughts which describe events in black-and-white categories, with no shades of gray. It is a more extreme form of magnification and minimization in which we minimize to the point that many positive aspects of life completely disappear from sight. Such automatic thoughts lead to a kind of perfectionism that defines everything short of 100% success as a failure. To a point, such perfectionism can lead us to try harder; but in the long run, inevitably, it tends to discourage us from trying at all. Since we encounter very little black or white in the real world, this kind of thinking squeezes much of the brightness out of our view of the world: all the shades of gray come to look as black as night.

A few years ago I was teaching a class in which several standardized tests were required. One semester, a woman took the class who got the highest total score on the standardized tests that I've ever recorded in that class. Out of a possible 200 points on the four tests, she missed five. But when this woman got her first essay back, she found several criticisms and suggestions for improvement. (The essay was not graded.) She seemed depressed and irritable in class for several days after getting the essay back. Finally, I persuaded her to come in and talk to me about it, and I asked her what she was so concerned about. 

"Well," she said hopelessly, "I guess I'm just going to get an 'F' in this class." From her point of view, her essay wasn't perfect, so it was worthless. Her automatic thoughts on receiving the essay back were probably something like this: "There are flaws in this essay, even after I worked hard on it, so I wasted my time. I produced nothing of value." That's all-or-nothing thinking.

This cognitive distortion can be devastating when you are trying to learn a new skill or improve your performance in an old one. A sculptor who thinks in terms of all-or-nothing will never finish a statue because the first stages of the work will always be rough. A writer who sees her rough draft as either finished or failed will never really finish an essay. You must accept your first draft as potentially good, but unfinished, in order to improve it. Many students fail to produce good essays not because they produce bad ones, but because they never finish the good ones they start.

Link: http://daphne.palomar.edu/jtagg/allor.htm

Mental Filter

Mental Filter

In this cognitive distortion, you concentrate so strongly on one aspect of a task or a situation that you can't even see the rest. Your automatic thoughts all deal with this one concern. If, for example, you ran out of time on a previous test, you may find yourself so preoccupied with the time limit that you have trouble concentrating on the questions. Five minutes into an hour-long test, you find yourself glancing at the clock. The automatic thought that keeps coming up is, "I'm going to run out of time." It may also be true that you can work faster on this test because you know the material better, but the cognitive distortion filters out that fact, and all the others that might help you. 

This is a conversation that I've had, with slight variations, with dozens of students:

STUDENT: So you hated my essay, huh?
ME: What do you mean, "hated it"? Where do you get that? You've got your essay right there--What did I say? Read me the first two words after your name, the first comment I made about it.
STUDENT: "Good essay."
ME: Why would I say that about an essay I hated? If I had hated it, wouldn't I be more likely to say something like, "Lousy essay"?
STUDENT: Yeah, but you go on about all this stuff wrong with it. You say I don't present enough evidence.

If you concentrate on a negative comment and filter out all the positive ones, you will nearly always be disappointed with your performance, even when you ought to be proud of it.

Three kinds of mental filters deserve special attention:

• Magnification and Minimization
  
• All-or-Nothing Thinking
  
• Disqualifying the Positive 

Source: http://daphne.palomar.edu/jtagg/mental.htm

Can cognitive behavioural therapy really change our brains? (BBC)

Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is a type of talking therapy that's used to treat a wide range of mental health problems, from depression and eating disorders to phobias and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). It recommends looking at ourselves in a different way that might prove useful for all of us in everyday life. But what happens to our brains when we have CBT?

What is cognitive behavioural therapy?

CBT is based on the idea that problems aren't caused by situations themselves, but by how we interpret them in our thoughts. These can then affect our feelings and actions.

The way we think about a situation can affect how we feel and how we act

For example, if someone you know walks by without saying hello, what's your reaction?

You might think that they ignored you because they don't like you, which might make you feel rejected. So you might be tempted to avoid them the next time you meet. This could breed more bad feeling between you both and more "rejections", until eventually you believe that you must be unlikeable. If this happened with enough people, you could start to withdraw socially.

But how well did you interpret the situation in the first place?

 

Continue reading the main story

Common errors in thinking style

• Emotional reasoning - e.g. I feel guilty so I must be guilty
• Jumping to conclusions - e.g. if I go into work when I'm feeling low, I'll only feel worse
• All-or-nothing thinking - e.g. if I've not done it perfectly, then it's absolutely useless
• Mental filtering - e.g. noticing my failures more than my successes
• Over generalising - e.g. nothing ever goes well in my life
• Labelling - e.g. I'm a loser

CBT aims to break negative vicious cycles by identifying unhelpful ways of reacting that creep into our thinking. 

"Emotional reasoning is a very common error in people's thinking," explains Dr Jennifer Wild, Consultant Clinical Psychologist from Kings College London. "That's when you think something must be true because of how you feel."

CBT tries to replace these negative thinking styles with more useful or realistic ones.

This can be a challenge for people with mental health disorders, as their thinking styles can be well-established.

How do we break negative thinking styles?

Some psychological theories suggest that we learn these negative thinking patterns through a process called negative reinforcement. 

 

Graded exposure can help people confront their phobias

For example, if you have a fear of spiders, by avoiding them you learn that your anxiety levels can be reduced. So you're rewarded in the short term with less anxiety but this reinforces the fear.

To unlearn these patterns, people with phobias and anxiety disorders often use a CBT technique called graded exposure. By gradually confronting what frightens them and observing that nothing bad actually happens, it's possible to slowly retrain their brains to not fear it.

How does cognitive behavioural therapy work on the brain?

Primitive survival instincts like fear are processed in a part of the brain called the limbic system. This includes the amygdala, a region that processes emotion, and the hippocampus, a region involved in reliving traumatic memories.

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“Start Quote

It seems that CBT really can change your brain and rewire it.”

Dr Paul Blenkiron, Consultant Psychiatrist 

 

Brain scan studies have shown that overactivity in these two regions returns to normal after a course of CBT in people with phobias. 

What's more, studies have found that CBT can also change the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for higher-level thinking.

So it seems that CBT might be able to make real, physical changes to both our "emotional brain" (instincts) and our "logical brain" (thoughts). 

Intriguingly, similar patterns of brain changes have been seen with CBT and with drug treatments, suggesting that psychotherapies and medications might work on the brain in parallel ways.

How effective is cognitive behavioural therapy? 

Of all the talking therapies, CBT has the most clinical evidence to show that it works. 

Studies have shown that it is at least as effective as medication for many types of depression and anxiety disorders. 

But unlike many drugs, there are few side effects with CBT. After a relatively short course, people have often described long-lasting benefits. 

"In the trials we've run with post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] and social anxiety disorder, we've seen that even when people stop the therapy, they continue improving because they have new tools in place and they've made behavioural and thinking style changes," Dr Wild explains.

Continue reading the main story

Find out more

• Watch David, 25, and Wayne, 24, use CBT to help with their mental health in Inside My Mind on BBC Three, 7 August 2013 at 8pm, and afterwards on iPlayer
• Find out more about mental health in the It's a Mad World season on BBC Three

CBT may not be for everyone, however. 

Since the focus is on tackling the here and now, people with more complicated roots to their mental problems which could stem from their childhood, for example, may need another type of longer-term therapy to explore this. 

CBT also relies on commitment from the individual, including "homework" between therapy sessions. It can also involve confronting fears and anxieties, and this isn't always easy to do. 

Ultimately, as with many types of treatment, some people will benefit from CBT more than others and psychologists and neuroscientists are beginning to unravel the reasons behind this. 

Fuente: http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/0/23590545

Relaxation Techniques for Stress Relief (Finding the Relaxation Exercises That Work for You)

For many of us, relaxation means zoning out in front of the TV at the end of a stressful day. But this does little to reduce the damaging effects of stress. To effectively combat stress, we need to activate the body's natural relaxation response. You can do this by practicing relaxation techniques such as deep breathing, meditation, rhythmic exercise, and yoga. Fitting these activities into your life can help reduce everyday stress and boost your energy and mood.

The relaxation response: Bringing your nervous system back into balance

Stress is necessary for life. You need stress for creativity, learning, and your very survival. Stress is only harmful when it becomes overwhelming and interrupts the healthy state of equilibrium that your nervous system needs to remain in balance. Unfortunately, overwhelming stress has become an increasingly common characteristic of contemporary life. When stressors throw your nervous system out of balance, relaxation techniques can bring it back into a balanced state by producing the relaxation response, a state of deep calmness that is the polar opposite of the stress response. 

When stress overwhelms your nervous system your body is flooded with chemicals that prepare you for "fight or flight." While the stress response can be lifesaving in emergency situations where you need to act quickly, it wears your body down when constantly activated by the stresses of everyday life. The relaxation response puts the brakes on this heightened state of readiness and brings your body and mind back into a state of equilibrium.

Producing the relaxation response

A variety of different relaxation techniques can help you bring your nervous system back into balance by producing the relaxation response. The relaxation response is not lying on the couch or sleeping but a mentally active process that leaves the body relaxed, calm, and focused. 

Learning the basics of these relaxation techniques isn’t difficult, but it does take practice. Most stress experts recommend setting aside at least 10 to 20 minutes a day for your relaxation practice. If you’d like to get even more stress relief, aim for 30 minutes to an hour. If that sounds like a daunting commitment, remember that many of these techniques can be incorporated into your existing daily schedule—practiced at your desk over lunch or on the bus during your morning commute.

Finding the relaxation technique that’s best for you

There is no single relaxation technique that is best for everyone. When choosing a relaxation technique, consider your specific needs, preferences, fitness level, and the way you tend to react to stress. The right relaxation technique is the one that resonates with you, fits your lifestyle, and is able to focus your mind and interrupt your everyday thoughts in order to elicit the relaxation response. In many cases, you may find that alternating or combining different techniques will keep you motivated and provide you with the best results.

How you react to stress may influence the relaxation technique that works best for you:

How do you react to stress?
Do you tend to become angry, agitated, or keyed up?
You may respond best to relaxation techniques that quiet you down, such as meditation, deep breathing, or guided imagery
Do you tend to become depressed, withdrawn, or spaced out?
You may respond best to relaxation techniques that are stimulating and that energize your nervous system, such as rhythmic exercise
Do you tend to freeze-speeding up internally, while slowing down externally?
Your challenge is to identify relaxation techniques that provide both safety and stimulation to help you “reboot” your system. Techniques such as mindfulness walking or power yoga might work well for you

Do you need alone time or social stimulation?

If you crave solitude, solo relaxation techniques such as meditation or progressive muscle relaxation will give you the space to quiet your mind and recharge your batteries. If you crave social interaction, a class setting will give you the stimulation and support you’re looking for. Practicing with others may also help you stay motivated. 

Link: http://www.helpguide.org/mental/stress_relief_meditation_yoga_relaxation.htm