All-Or-Nothing Thinking: Seeing things in black and white categories. May also be called perfectionism.
e.g. “If I don’t do better than everyone else, I’ll be a total failure.”
Overgeneralizing: Seeing a single negative event as part of a comprehensive and interminable pattern.
e.g. “Everything in my life is a mess and will never get better.”
e.g. “I never do anything right.”
Selective Attention: Isolating and dwelling exclusively on a single negative detail.
e.g. “My boss hated my report,” when in fact, your boss said the report was good overall but that the conclusion needed editing.
Discounting the Positives: Overlooking positive experiences and seeing them as not counting, allowing you to maintain a negative believe that is contradicted by everyday experiences. Closely related to selective attention.
Jumping to Conclusions: Making a negative interpretation despite the absence of definite facts to support the conclusion. Two types:
Mind-Reading: Believing someone is reacting negatively ot you without knowing for sure or checking with the other person.
e.g. Assuming the reason someone is asking for more information is that they doubt the truth of what you’re saying.
Fortune-Telling: Anticipating that things will turn out badly, and regarding the prediction as an established fact.
e.g. “I know I’ll make a fool out of myself at the party and have a bad time, so I’d better not go.”
Personalization: Seeing oneself as the cause of some negative external event for which one is not in fact primarily responsible.
e.g. “That person must have left the room while I was speaking because I’m a boring speaker.”
“Should” statements: Maintaining excessive “shoulds,” “musts,” and “oughts,” implying the need for guilt and punishment when unfulfilled.
e.g. “I should be able to work at top efficiency the entire day.”
Catastrophizing
http://psychcentral.com/lib/2007/what-is-catastrophizing/