𝗦𝗘𝗟𝗙 𝗜𝗠𝗔𝗚𝗘 𝗩𝗜𝗦 𝗔 𝗩𝗜𝗦 𝗖𝗢𝗚𝗡𝗜𝗧𝗜𝗩𝗘 𝗗𝗜𝗦𝗧𝗢𝗥𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡𝗦

Vidula my wife 👰 keeps on saying nowadays that she is putting on weight although she is perfectly physically fit or to say much fitter then earlier .This thought led me to recollect my psychology days about cognitive distortions and how it makes our self Image. I have seen what ever we start thinking about ourselves we actually start becoming. 

So this leads to the concept 𝚘𝚏 

𝚁𝚎𝚗𝚞𝚖𝚎𝚛𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚃𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚔𝚒𝚗𝚐..

These are negative thought patterns that keep on coming again and again in our minds.... It  represent an ongoing attempt to come up with insight or solutions to problems we are concerned about. These unhelpful filters make whatever life circumstances we find ourselves in that much more anxiety-provoking and challenging.

What are unhelpful cognitive distortions?

The main cognitive distortions are as follows (and some of them overlap):

• Black-and-white (or all-or-nothing) Thinking I never have anything interesting to say.
• Jumping to conclusions (or mind-reading)The doctor is going to tell me I have cancer.
• Personalization Our team lost because of me.
• Should-ing and must-ing (using language that is self-critical that puts a lot of pressure on you): I should be losing weight.
• Mental filter (focusing on the negative, such as the one aspect of a health change which you didn’t do well): I am terrible at getting enough sleep.
• Overgeneralization: I’ll never find a partner.
• Magnification and minimization (magnifying the negative, minimizing the positive): It was just one healthy meal.
• Fortune-telling: My cholesterol is going to be sky-high.
• Comparison (comparing just one part of your performance or situation to another’s, which you don’t really know, so that it makes you appear in a negative light): All of my coworkers are happier than me.
• Catastrophizing (combination of fortune-telling and all-or-nothing thinking; blowing things out of proportion): This spot on my skin is probably skin cancer; I’ll be dead soon.
• Labeling: I’m just not a healthy person.
• Disqualifying the positive: I answered that well, but it was a lucky guess. 
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𝙀𝙢𝙤𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡  𝙍𝙚𝙖𝙨𝙤𝙣𝙞𝙣𝙜

Many of us engage in emotional reasoning, a process in which our negative feelings about ourselves inform our thoughts, as if they were factually based,; in the absence of any facts to support these unpleasant feelings.

 In other words, your emotions and feelings about a situation become your actual view of the situation, regardless of any information to the contrary. Emotional reasoning often employs many of the other cognitive filters to sustain it, such as catastrophizing and disqualifying the positive. Examples of this may be thinking:

• I look fat even though you are perfectly fit 

• I’m an awful student, even if you are getting some good grades
• My partner is cheating on me, even if there is no evidence for this (jealousy is defining your reality)
• Nobody likes me, even if you have friends (loneliness informs your thinking).

• How do you challenge and change cognitive distortion

•  I’ve learned to remind myself that whatever comes up, I’ll deal with it as well as I can. I try to trust my future self to cope, in an effective way, with whatever life will throw my way. 

  As an example, if you are driving on a highway some or other vehicle will go ahead of your vehicle, they are just cutting off a random car, not you, because they have no idea who you are. So there’s no reason to take it personally. To personalize situations like this just makes you upset. If you don’t take it personally, it changes it from "idiot cut me off" to "people should drive more safely."

• As they say in the new movie  Dune, "fear is the mind-killer." Being anxious or afraid certainly makes me less effective, no matter what I’m trying to accomplish.