 Welcome to Happiness Isn't Brain Surgery with Doc Snipes. This podcast was created to provide you the information and tools Doc Snipes gives her clients so that you too can start living happier. Our website, docsknipes.com, has even more resources, videos, and handouts, and even interactive sessions with Doc Snipes to help you apply what you learn. Go to docsknipes.com to learn more. I'd like to welcome everybody to Happiness Isn't Brain Surgery with Doc Snipes, practical tools to improve your mood and quality of life. Today, we're going to be talking about something called cognitive distortions. And that's basically the way you think and looking at how the way you think may keep you stuck in being unhappy. So we'll start by defining these thinking errors called cognitive distortions and explore some different types of thinking errors and what you might be able to do to start changing your thinking pattern so you can live a little bit happier. Thinking errors or in recovery circles, we call it stinking thinking, plays a large part in keeping people miserable. When you wake up in the morning, for example, think about it. If you look outside and it's raining today, it was gloomy and rainy and foggy and nasty outside. Now, you know, I could have let that get me in a bad mood and be like, oh, it's going to be a bad hair day. It's going to be gloomy. I'm going to be tired all day. I can focus on all that negative stuff. That's true. Or I can choose to look at it and go, well, you know, at least it's not pouring down rain and the grass is going to get watered and, you know, I have to work today. So, you know, if it's going to rain, better to be on one of those days where I'm going to have to be inside all day. So you can look at it in two different ways. Now, if you look at it the first way, it's probably going to get you in kind of a grumpy mood. If you look at it the second way, it may not make you thrilled, but you can find the upside to it and you can find a way to look at it in a way that's not going to keep you miserable. Addiction, depression, anxiety, anger, guilt often stem from or are made worse by some of these thinking errors. So when you start feeling stuck, when you start feeling unhappy, you want to look at how you're thinking and ask yourself, you know, am I looking at all aspects of the situation or am I just focusing on the negative part? Addressing these thought patterns will help not help you not make a mountain out of a molehill. A lot of times something happens and we look at it and it's just a catastrophe. Now that can happen if you let stuff build up, you know, you just take stuff in and go whatever, take more in, go whatever and you're just stuffing it down, stuffing it down and you get to that proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. You can't shove one more thing in that closet and get the door shut and everything comes pouring out. So this is one thing you want to look at is, are you handling stress and distress and unpleasantness as it comes up or are you stuffing it down, trying to ignore it and getting progressively unhappy each time? The other thing that you want to look at is whatever the situation is, are you looking at it catastrophically or are you looking at it in reality? If your roommate forgets to put the toilet seat down, you know, that's probably not a catastrophe. So if you turn it into one and make it just kind of destroy your day, then, you know, look at, was it worth the effort? Was it worth all that emotional turmoil because you sat down without looking and got your butt wet? We're going to assume that the roommate flushed the toilet. But that's beside the point. Ultimately, you want to look at things and determine is this really worth getting this upset about? Focus on the parts you can change. You know, you may not be able to change your roommate and get him to put the toilet seat down. That's just the way it is. You know, some people are going to be motivated to do it. Some people, no matter how many sticky notes and things you put up, they're just not going to do it. I've got two kids, both teenagers, one's a girl, one's a boy. They have this problem regularly with not putting the toilet seat down, not flushing the toilet, leaving whiskers all over the sink. Obviously, that's the boy, not the girl. But we want to focus on the things we can change. You know, with certain situations, when you're dealing with other people, what parts of it can you change? You may be able to talk to them about it. And maybe that'll work. But you can also change how you react to it and either accept it as it is or change the situation. You know, maybe that's not going to be a good roommate combination for you. Hopefully something like the toilet seat isn't one of those things that is a mountain to you and it's going to mean you've got to move out. But that's a decision you've got to make on your own. And you also want to identify and eliminate thought patterns that are keeping you stuck. If you view everything people do that gets under your skin a little bit as a personal slight, as a personal affront, as something they're doing because they don't respect you, then you're probably going to feel pretty bad most of the time. So, you know, again, looking at my kid's situation. If every time my son left whiskers on the counter, my daughter took it as he has no respect for me, she'd be pretty miserable all the time. If she can look at it in terms of he's a teenage boy and he's forgetful half the time he doesn't remember to put on deodorant, then, you know, that's going to be something different because that obviously has nothing to do with her. So, looking at what parts you can change, identifying how big of a deal it is in the big scheme of things and identifying alternate solutions for my daughter, we've got other bathrooms. So, if she wants to use one of the other bathrooms to get ready, so she doesn't have to deal with it, that's her prerogative. She chooses not to. So, those are just some things that you can consider as we go through this presentation. Cognitive distortions take a thought and kind of manipulate it to fulfill your expectations of a situation. We base a lot of our thoughts and interpretations of events on schema, which are kind of shortcut memories based on similar situations. So, for example, you may have a schema about going into a job interview because you've been to job interviews before. So, when you walk into this job interview, you expect certain things to happen. You expect to act a certain way. And if you walk into this job interview and instead of being one-on-one, it's a panel interview and an experiential sort of thing, it's probably going to throw you for a loop. So, what we're doing when we're using schemas is we're trying to anticipate what's going to happen so we can best prepare. Sometimes those memories aren't accurate. And sometimes our thoughts conform to our current headspace. So, if you're in a bad mood, it's more likely you're going to look at the negative, look at the insulting, look at the personal stuff of a situation, the personal interpretations, instead of looking at the other alternatives. And there's always other alternatives. In dialectics, we call this walking the middle path. When you have a negative thought, try to find a more positive thought. Like I said, with the rain today, for example, there is no way I'm going to be just overjoyed with it because we've had so much rain lately. But I can find less obnoxious ways to think about it and feel about it besides getting on my own pity pod about how it's going to be another rainy day. So, you want to try to walk the middle path. You want to try to get out of your headspace and go, you know what, I'm in a bad mood, so I'm only going to see the negative. When you have a negative thought, find a positive one. And even if it's an unrelated thought, find a positive because you want to balance out the negative and the positive. Irrational thoughts kind of go along with cognitive distortions. All irrational thoughts or what I call unhelpful thoughts involve some level of cognitive distortion. It involves some level of inaccuracy, if you will. They're usually extreme. It involves saying something must happen all the time or never happens any of the time. There are very few things that you can say with 100% certainty, always or never happen. With the exception of death, if you're a living person, you are going to die. We know that all people die. But other than that, what things can you say with 100% certainty, always happen? Irrational thoughts are often unrealistic. Using those extreme terms or using faulty information, we might glean that something is dangerous when it's really not dangerous. So it creates a sense of fear within ourself. And if irrational or unhelpful thoughts create feelings of failure, inadequacy or disempowerment. Now, if something always happens and it's a negative something, yeah, you're going to feel disempowered. You can't not die. So sticking with the one thing we know always happens, we are a little bit disempowered there. However, you can choose to live fully during the time you have on this earth. So what causes these thinking errors? One of them is information processing shortcuts, those schemas I talked about. Sometimes they're outdated. If for example, you grew up in a household where there was a lot of chaos and drama and negativity and violence, then when you see somebody speaking with big gestures like I often do and being loud like I often am, you might interpret that as negativity when in actuality it's just more dramatic than anything. I grew up in a family that was loud. That's just the way we were. So somebody who comes from a different background might interpret that as a scary situation when none needs to exist, but they don't know that. So you wanna look at the present situation and go, you know, this seems unpleasant, this seems scary, this seems whatever. Is it in this, what are the facts in this current situation that this is accurate, that my interpretations are accurate of this event? Mental noise, we all are guilty and Americans tend to be more guilty than others from what I've read in the literature of wanting to formulate our response to something before we've actually heard what the other person is saying. We're also guilty of not being mindful. We've got our mind going in six different directions and we're not paying attention to one thing. And if you're not paying attention, then you're going to miss some of the other stuff that's going on. For example, when you're driving home from work, you're probably thinking about your day, thinking about what you're gonna have for dinner, thinking about what you gotta do once you get home, all those honeydews on the list. You know, there's a lot of mental noise going on in there. So you may not notice on your drive home, the bunny rabbits on the side of the road or the deer that we're getting ready to cross the street or the hawk on the power line or the sunset. So having mental noise keeps us from being fully aware of certain situations. So you may get home and go, yeah, it was, you know, a normal drive, whatever, nothing unique happened. When in actuality, there were a lot of things that happened, you just didn't notice them. So you couldn't say, wow, on my way home, I saw a whole family of deer grazing and three bunny rabbits hopped across the street and that hawk that's always on the power line was still on the power line today. So you wanna cut out mental noise. So you can be more aware of the whole situation, not just the bits and pieces you catch kind of out of the corner of your eye. The brain's limited information processing capacity. Now this can be partly because of age. Children, especially young children don't think in terms of possibilities. They're not able to think in terms of possibilities. They have what's called concrete reasoning. So they see things as all or nothing, black or white, good or bad. And that's not saying that they can't eventually develop that, but up until a certain age, around elementary school, children tend to think very dichotomously. One or the other, there's no middle ground. You can't be aggressive and mean to me and beat me and love me at the same time. You either love me or you hate me. So this is why a lot of young children have a hard time, sort of rectifying things in their head when they come from families where there's domestic violence, when they come from families where they've been abused, or when they come from families where there's addiction or depression. They see a parent who's clinically depressed and in their mind, it's like, well, what did I do? Because children are also very egocentric. Everything's about them. So if mom's unhappy, it must be something I did. I made her unhappy. The child can't see all the other possibilities of things that might be going on. And as parents, we can help the children, we can tell the children, there are other things going on. We can tell the children a lot of stuff, give them the knowledge, but for them to be able to actually internalize it and go, okay, it's not about me. That's her stuff, let it be. You're not gonna see a five-year-old or a six-year-old probably capable of doing that. So when the person gets older, they need to look back and maybe reevaluate some of the ways they interpreted things that happened in their life, if they have a sense of abandonment, if they feel unlovable, and explore where that came from. Maybe their parent was not able to be there for them emotionally, because their parent was just emotionally distraught, wrought with addiction, whatever the case may be. So they interpreted it as something faulty with them. So then as adults, they haven't checked that interpretation and they still interpret things that way. As adults, we can look back and go, you know what, maybe it wasn't all about me. Maybe there was other stuff going on with mom or dad. And maybe when I look at this current situation where somebody is struggling, maybe it's not about a rejection of me, maybe it's about their stuff. So as adults, we become more able to take other people's perspectives and look at possibilities. Another situation that creates problems in interpreting events and memories and everything else is crisis. When you are in crisis, you are not going to see the big picture. You are not necessarily going to get all the details and you are probably going to interpret things from a fight or flight perspective. You're not going to be looking for the good in what's going on when you're in crisis. Now this could be, you know, a big crisis like a natural disaster, being a victim of crime, or it could be a more daily crisis, if you will, such as changing jobs or finding out that you're having a new baby. You know, it's a good thing, but it's a big change and change causes crisis. So being aware that any big change in your life is probably going to alter the way you think about things and maybe prevent you from seeing the whole picture. So if you start feeling negative, you start getting stuck, take a step back and maybe get some input from other people. Emotional causes of thinking errors. This means you base your judgment, your logic on how you feel. I feel scared, therefore this must be scary. A lot of people make this thinking error, if you will, about airplanes. I'm afraid to fly, therefore it must mean that flying is scary and dangerous. You know, when you look at the facts, you find out that, you know, flying is actually safer than driving, but when you just look at the news and what we call the availability heuristic, they don't tell you about the 20,000 flights a day that are successful. They tell you about the one flight every year or so that crashes, but that's the one you remember because they keep telling you about it. So it seems more dangerous. It seems more likely than it really is. So the emotional causes, you know, you want to step back and say, what are the facts for and against the way I'm feeling? And what I'm thinking about this situation. Am I basing everything on emotional reasoning or are there actually facts to support my position? Moral causes of thinking errors, it was the right thing to do. We can convince ourself most of the time that anything we do is the right thing to do. But you want to step back and look at it and ask in the big picture in my life, was it the right thing to do? Is it the right thing to do for me and my family or me and my significant others at this point in time? You know, every right is partially right. There's no 100% right all the time. So you need to look at it and figure out, you know, in some cases, this may be the right thing to do, but you know, an example is when you're driving down the street and you see someone who's homeless, giving them money is that the right thing to do. People can argue both sides of that. Giving them a toiletry bag, which is something that I suggest to people who do want to help others who are homeless, who are struggling, you know, give them a bag that has basic items like deodorant and toothpaste, toothbrush, combs, anything like that that they might need in order to feel a little bit better that they can't afford. And you know, that's one thing that you can do or give them gift certificates to certain places. There are restaurants that will let you pay it forward and you can buy a meal for someone who is in need. And then when someone who is in need comes in, they'll apply the money to that. But there are a lot of different ways of looking at, okay, what is it that you want to do? You want to help this person? Well, is that the right thing to do? Certainly, sure, let's go with that. Now, what is the right way to go about it in the way that would be most helpful? Social causes of thinking errors, everybody's doing it. But we know from basic drug and alcohol abuse research that a lot of teenagers, for example, think that all of their friends or the majority of their friends are using drugs, are drinking alcohol, are partying all night long. When in reality, it's probably a significant minority, but it's not all of them. So encourage people, again, to go back to the facts instead of, you know, it just seems like, well, it seems like it, what is the evidence that supports that? When we have thinking errors, it causes us to get in this fight or flee situation. It causes us to feel threatened, angry, anxious, unhappy, whatever word you wanna use for it, which is what keeps us distressed. It keeps that HPA access going, which reduces the access to serotonin, one of our happy anti-anxiety chemicals. It impairs our sleep, which also reduces our ability to feel happy. So we don't want to feel that ways unless we need to. I mean, fight or flee has a purpose and there's a time and a place for it, but most of us who experience depression, anxiety, unhappy moods more often than not are triggering that fight or flee response when it doesn't need to be triggered. It's based on faulty information or faulty thinking patterns, which causes depression, anxiety, withdrawing from things that you might enjoy because you're exhausted. If you're always on high alert, it's exhausting. Addictions to numb the pain or just help you silence the noise for a little while. Sleep problems and changes, like I said, that just is a natural artifact of being on alert. If your threat response system is on, you ain't gonna sleep well. That's fact of life. Eating changes. Your eating hormones are linked to getting good quality of sleep and circadian rhythms. So if you're not getting good quality sleep when you're messing up your circadian rhythms, you're probably not gonna know when you're hungry because your eating hormones are out of whack, plus a lot of us eat in response to stress as a self soothing sort of thing because high fat, high sugar, high carbohydrate foods tend to cause a release of feel good chemicals. When you're in this fight or flee state, you're also gonna have more stress related illnesses, headaches, stomach upset, neck pain, you name it, you know how you feel when you get stressed. You know the physical complications. And socially, if you're not getting enough sleep, if you are anxious, depressed or angry, if you're not feeling well physically, you're probably not a gem to be around. You're irritable and impatient. You just don't have the energy left to take that extra moment to go, you know what, let me think about this. You may withdraw from others, which creates more of a problem because social supports, healthy social supports, are our greatest buffer against stress. So you can see how all of these things feed in on each other to keep you unhappy and depressed. So you need to figure out where are you going to pull that thread to unravel the web of unhappiness. Cognitions, the way you think is one place to do it. We develop thinking errors for many reasons. The key to keeping them in check is to remain mindful of your thoughts and challenge baseless and extreme thinking patterns. So if you're having a thought that's something scary or if you're having a thought that, you know, your significant other is cheating on you. Okay, that's a thought. Now, what is the evidence for it? You can have a feeling, but that feeling may be based on stuff from your past that you're just expecting to happen again. So take that thought, take that feeling and find the evidence. Ask yourself, what is the concrete evidence? What is the reliable source that I can use to find information to either validate or invalidate how my feeling of stress right now? By addressing thinking errors, you can reduce stress, which improves your physical health, concentration, sleep, energy levels and your mood in general. So why not? It can't hurt to try. If you like this podcast, you can subscribe on your favorite podcast app, join our Facebook group at docsnipes.com slash Facebook, subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash all CEU's education or join our community and access additional resources at docsnipes.com. Thanks for tuning into happiness isn't brain surgery with Doc Snipes. Our mission is to make practical tools for living the happiest life, affordable and accessible to everyone. We record the podcast during a Facebook live broadcast each week. Join us free at docsnipes.com slash Facebook or subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcast player. 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