Therapy can be expensive and NHS waiting times can be very long.

Whilst you wait. Do please consider becoming a patron at https://www.patreon.com/richardnicholls and for £6 per month you will get access to over 20 sessions worth of psychotherapy related audio with updates every Monday morning.

As well as hours and hours of varying hypnotherapy tracks to listen to, again updating each Monday.

It doesn’t replace one to one therapy but I hope my content would be a great help to you on your journey to overcoming your difficulties.
The Richard Nicholls Podcast

Free bonus episodes and hypnosis audio when you subscribe to Richard's newsletter!

Forgotten?

Episode 245: Cognitive Distortions

Transcript

And hello to you, and welcome to the Richard Nicholls Podcast, the personal development podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate, and motivate you to be the best you can be. I'm psychotherapist Richard Nicholls, and this episode is all about cognitive distortions. And if you're ready, We'll start the show!

Alright there folks, Happy New Year! How's it hanging? New Years often feel like a line in the sand. As if now that we call it something else, things are going to be different now. Well, if you had a crappy 2024, Fingers crossed for a better 2025. Strange expression that, wonder where it comes from. Something to do with representing the cross of Christ to ward off evil spirits, people sometimes suggest, but aren't there better ways of making a cross shape with your fingers?

So, ah, who knows? Different cultures have different superstitions, don't they? Don't tell somebody in Sweden or Germany you got your fingers crossed about something. Because that means something else there. That means that you're dishonest, that you're a liar. Instead, they say, to press your thumbs. Keep meaning to do an episode about superstitions at some point, because the mindset that they create can definitely either create a positive mindset or a negative one, depending on your beliefs.

And there are a lot of tricks that our mind plays on us that traps us into a negative mindset. We tend to refer to them as cognitive distortions. Like I always say, overcoming problems starts with understanding and accepting them. So listen up people, let's see how many of these traps you fall into.

Things like confirmation bias, because that's a biggie and I know I've spoken about it quite a bit before. I'll probably never stop because it's so common a trap to fall into. Confirmation bias, If you've forgotten already, is our tendency to only see evidence that supports an existing belief rather than alternatives.

So if you already think of yourself as unlovable, then even if your partner shows, that they love you, you're less likely to notice. They could remind you about your dentist appointment. They could drop off and pick up you and your friends from a restaurant, so you can have a night out. They can make a shopping list with suggestions about the ingredients to make the meals that you like, so you're not always eating what they fancy all the time.

And there's all the different various ways that you can show love for somebody, even the more obvious ones, and they can be totally ignored and forgotten if your self esteem is low. But if they didn't bother with a valentine's card. Or they came home from work and they're a bit quiet one night, they're tetchy, or they're a bit snappy, then aha!

Evidence! Evidence that they're thinking of leaving me, there. Evidence that they regret marrying me and they're questioning their life choices. And bigger problems occur then, when we push them away first. Because you're worried that they're going to get the opportunity to hurt us, but that's another story, but it's part of all this confirmation bias.

And that's not just about the big things like relationships though, that can be as simple as just not noticing when the traffic lights were on green for most of your journey out somewhere. But feeling that the world is out to get you when they're on red on the way back home again. We focus on and remember the things that prove our point.

And we delete the things that contradict our existing beliefs. That's confirmation bias. And this happens all the time. Totally unconsciously, this is not a deliberate decision to sabotage our happiness. We don't even know that we're doing it. And it sounds like our brain is out to get us. And it's not.

Not really. It's just that we can train it to get good at seeing certain things. If you did a word search, but the words that you were looking for were in a language that you didn't read as well, it's going to take you longer than if you're looking for words in your first language because your brain has already been primed to look for what's familiar.

In the same way, if you feel that the world is against you, then that's what you'll see. If you feel that your friends don't like you, then that's what you'll see. For most of our time on this earth, our reality doesn't really exist. It's just our brain's interpretation of our reality that becomes our experiences, and our brain can't always be trusted.

And this is why, when a court case needs a jury, they need independent people without any bias. People that are unconnected to the case, so it doesn't become a witch trial. We know that. Sometimes in our own life we need to take the blinkers off so that we are more open minded and force ourselves to think independently to our emotions.

Otherwise we put ourselves on trial without realising it and then we become judge, jury and executioner. Our experiences, our needs, our beliefs shouldn't be binary. There is more to what goes on in our relationships, than love and hate, there's more to our development than fail and succeed. There's more to our emotions than happy or sad.

And that's called dichotomous thinking, black and white thinking or polarised thinking. Very unhelpful perspective for everything because it prevents us from noticing the middle ground. The nuances, the subtleties that means that the Christmas Day meal that you cooked, that might have had a bad review if you'd served it up in a posh restaurant and charged 100 quid for it.

It was still good enough. It mightn't be a fantastic meal, but that doesn't mean that it's a bad one. And we do this a lot, comparing extremes and noticing contrasts. And maybe we taught to at quite an early age, you know, there was no, there was no character in the Mr Men books called Mr Normal or Mr Average, Mr Not That Tall But Not That Short Either.

There were the extremes. We had a Mr. Wrong and a Mr. Perfect, Mr. Small and a Mr. Tall, Little Miss Shy and Little Miss Bossy. We were maybe brought up to learn to see the world in a dichotomous, black or white, all or nothing, nothing in between sort of way. So it is easy to click back into that way of thinking sometimes, but it's not healthy to live there.

Because it creates an unconscious need for perfectionism, if we're not careful. And the slightest mistake in a wedding speech means that it's a failure rather than a success. I was talking about Maureen Rees from the old BBC series Driving School on my Patreon podcast on Monday. Look me up on Patreon if you want to hear why.

Well, I'll tell you, I was talking about the importance of good self talk, actually, so hop on there, onto Patreon for six quid, see what you can learn if you fancy. But one thing I didn't mention was that to pass your theory test, you don't need to get every single question right. Do you? The multiple choice, the pass mark is 43 out of 50.

You get 7 wrong and you still pass. The hazard perception, it's 44 out of 75. You're expected to be good enough if you miss 30. And even taking a test to be in full control of a two ton petrol powered internal combustion engine. You can still make 15 mistakes and be good enough to pass. You can even make the same mistake twice and the examiner still won't fail you.

We need to recognise that there is more to our life than this black or white attitude. Was my Christmas day a failure? Because me and my wife didn't have a dozen presents each to unwrap. No, of course not. But am I a bad husband for not doing more? It's Valentine's Day next month. If I don't fill the bedroom with rose petals and shower her with gifts, is that going to make me a bad husband?

No. But if there is this black or white, good or bad model of the world that I live in then it would be easy to think of myself as unlovable because I couldn't make everything perfect for her. And that is a very dangerous perspective to look at everything with, isn't it? Because it creates an expectation that she'll eventually leave me.

And I'd live in fear all the time. And I've met people who live like that. You might live like that. Your partner might live like that. Be aware that there is more to life than yes or no, black or white, with you or against you. That's a common issue that crops up when someone lives this way. If you see evidence that someone isn't fully on board with you, that doesn't mean they're against it.

And it doesn't mean they're against you. If someone doesn't fully engage with you, it doesn't mean they dislike you. Like I say, there's a middle ground between love and hate, isn't there? Not everyone in your life has to love you. But if, to you, it's all or nothing, then the absence of someone's all means that you are nothing to them, and that's just not true.

We might be nothing to the bus driver that didn't make eye contact with us, or the till operator in the supermarket that genuinely couldn't care if customers lived or died that day. They just want to get home to their dog after a 12 hour shift. We might be a nobody to them, but we're still a valid member of the human race.

We're still important to our friends, valuable and likeable. If we're not careful, this way of thinking pushes people away. Or rather, we pull away from them. Because, you know, who wants to hang around with people who clearly hate them? Except it's not clear that they hate them. It's just clear that they don't adore them.

And that's okay. Even if it's family. Did our parents ruin our life because they didn't support our idea to become a model or an artist or a footballer when we were 16? Maybe things would be different if they had. Maybe for the worst, maybe for the better, but does that lack of support mean they're bad parents?

Or were they supportive parents despite that? Were they supportive despite not supporting the idea of not becoming a teacher like they were, or an accountant or whatever? Despite not supporting drama school or a sporting academy, did they teach you life skills? Did they show you how to cook a decent lasagna, take you to the theatre, to football matches or whatever?

Were they actually good enough? Now I know some of you listening might well be shaking your head and thinking, actually, no, my parents were dreadful. They weren't supportive at all. And I'm sorry about that. That's unfair on you. You deserved better. I know. For some of you, you might be holding a lot of resentment because someone, whether that's parents, friends, teachers, did the best they could in the only way that they knew how.

But because they weren't perfect, it doesn't mean that everything that has ever gone wrong for you in your life is their fault. Blaming others for things can very often prevent us from taking steps to put those wrong things right again. We have a lot more control over our life and our future than we think.

Sometimes we just need to make sure we don't fall into these cognitive distortion traps of, All or Nothing Thinking and Confirmation Bias and it all starts with awareness. We can't stop doing something that we don't know that we're doing. So sometimes we need to stop and ask ourselves, Am I mind reading here?

Am I making assumptions and jumping to conclusions? If you ever find yourself about to say the words, I know what you're thinking. Chances are, you don't. You know what YOU are thinking. And assuming that everyone thinks the same as you isn't always a good idea. There are times it's harmless, but if you've got low self esteem and you hate yourself, if you couple that up with this belief that you know what others are thinking, it creates a feeling that everyone hates you as much as you hate yourself.

And that is a really harmful road to be travelling down. So if you're on that road, you need to stop and see that actually there are many forks in the road, many roads to take your thoughts down. Not just two because of dichotomous thinking, but multiple roads with multiple reasons why somebody didn't return a text message.

It means slowing down our thinking, though, so that we can grapple it. Our instincts will always try to run ahead to the future. And it's a brilliant part of evolution. That's separated us from those that either died out or the ones that went on to become chimps. We can think about the future. We can think about possibilities.

And because of this, given enough natural selection to make it unconscious, a skill, we can jump on top of gazelles when they're running because we can time it right. And here we are, all these years later, using that same predictive ability to make assumptions that job interviewers will hate us, prospective partners will think that we're boring, and no one's ever going to sign up for our Patreon podcast.

But as everyone's favourite Mon Calamari Star Wars character Admiral Ackbar famously said, It's a trap! So, if you find yourself mind reading or trying to predict the future, then ask yourself this. Are these thoughts based on fact or fear? Because if they're fear based, and as previously acknowledged throughout this podcast series for all these years I've been doing it, our emotions cannot always be trusted to give us the right instructions.

Then that means it's okay to take a few deep breaths and look to see if there are some alternative thoughts that can be more appropriate. So have a good week putting this into practice and I will speak to you next time. Like I say, I'm on Patreon with full episodes every Monday morning and an enormous back catalogue.

So if you want to give yourself a new year boost in personal development, I shall see you on there. You take care and bye for now.

Back