Positive Reframing

Overgeneralization. You think about a negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat or a positive event as a never-ending pattern of success. For example, you label yourself “unlovable” after a breakup.

Jumping to Conclusions. You jump to conclusions that aren’t warranted by the facts. There are two common versions of this distortion.

Labeling. You label yourself or others so you see your entire self (or someone else) as totally defective or superior. For example, when you make a mistake, you call yourself a “loser” instead of saying, “I made a mistake.”

The Book in Five Big Ideas

1. Your negative emotions result from your thoughts and not from the circumstances of your life.
2. The negative thoughts that upset you are nearly always distorted and twisted.
3. When you can chan...

You feel the way you think. In other words, your negative emotions, like depression and anxiety, come from your thoughts and not from the circumstances of your life.

The negative thoughts that upset you are nearly always distorted and twis...

Discounting the Positive/Negative. You tell yourself that certain negative or positive facts don’t count to maintain a negative or positive image of yourself or the situation. For example, someone compliments you, and you tell y...

Mental Filtering. You focus on something bad and filter out all the positives—or you focus on something positive and ignore all the negatives. For example, you get one low rating in a job evaluation and conclude you’re doing a l...

Emotional Reasoning. You reason from how you feel. This can be very misleading because your feelings result entirely from your thoughts and not from external reality. For example, because you feel like an idiot, you reason you m...

 Should Statements. You make yourself miserable with shoulds, musts, or ought tos. Self-directed shoulds cause feelings of guilt, shame, depression, and worthlessness. Other-directed shoulds trigger feelings of anger and frustrat...

Magnification and Minimization. You blow things out of proportion or shrink their importance inappropriately. This is also called the “binocular trick” because things look much bigger or much smaller depending on what end of the...