Fix this Error in Thinking (if you want to be less anxious) | Ep. 379

Now fix this one error in thinking if you want to be less anxious or depressed, either one. Today, we are going to talk about why it is so important to be able to identify and challenge this one error in your thinking. It might be the difference between you suffering hard or actually being able to navigate some sticky thoughts with a little more ease. Let’s do it together.

Welcome back, everybody. My name is Kimberley Quinlan. I’m an anxiety and OCD specialist, and I am so excited to talk with you about this very important cognitive error or error in thinking that you might be engaging in and that might be making your life a lot harder. This is something I catch in myself quite regularly, so I don’t want you to feel like you’re wrong or bad for doing this behavior, but I also catch it a lot in my patients and my students. So, let’s talk about it. 

The one error you make is black-and-white thinking. This is a specific error in thinking, or we call it a cognitive distortion, where you think in absolutes. And I know, before you think, “Okay, I got the meat of the episode,” stay with me because it is so important that you identify the areas in your life in which you do this. You mightn’t even know you’re doing it. 

Again, often we’ve been thinking this way for so long, we start to believe our thoughts. Now, one thing to know, and let’s do a quick 101: we have thoughts all day. Everybody has them. We might have all types of thoughts, some helpful, some unhelpful. But if you have a thought that’s unhelpful or untrue and you think it over and over and over and over again, you will start to believe it. It will become a belief. Just like if you have a lovely, helpful thought and you think that thought over and over and over again, you will start to believe that too. 

And what I want you to know is often, for those with mental health struggles, whether that be generalized anxiety, panic disorder, depression, eating disorders, OCD, PTSD, social anxiety, the list goes on and on, one thing a lot of these disorders have in common is they all have a pretty significant level of errors in thinking that fuel the disorder, make the disorder worse, prevent them from recovering. My hope today is to help you identify where you are thinking in black and white so we can get to it and apply some tools, and hopefully get you out of that behavior as soon as possible. 

Here are some examples of black-and-white thinking that you’re probably engaging in in some area of your life. 

The first one is, things are all good or they’re all bad. An example might be, “My body is bad.” That there are good bodies and bad bodies. There are good people and bad people. There are good thoughts and bad thoughts. That’s very true for those folks with OCD. There are good body sizes and bad body sizes, very common in BDD and eating disorders. There are people who are good at social interaction and bad at social interaction. That often shows up with people with social anxiety. That certain sensations might be good, and certain sensations might be bad. So if you have panic disorder and you have a tight chest or a racing heart rate, you might label them as all bad. And this labeling, while it might seem harmless, is training your brain to be on high alert, is training your brain to think of things as absolutes, which does again create either anxiety or a sense of hopelessness, helplessness, and worthlessness specifically related to depression. So we’ve got to keep an eye out for the all good and the all bad. 

The next one we want to keep an eye out for is always and never. “I always make this mistake. I never do things right. I will always suffer. I will never get better.” These absolutes keep us stuck in this hole of dread. “It’ll always be this way. You’re always this way.” And the thing to know here is very, very rarely is something always or never true. We can go on to talk about this here in a little bit, but I want you just to sit with that for a second. It’s almost never true that almost never is the truth. How does that sound for a little bit of a tongue twister? 

Next thing is perfect versus failure. If you’re someone who is aiming for that is either perfect or “I’m a failure,” we are probably going to have a lot of anxiety and negative feelings about yourself. This idea that something is a failure. I have done episodes on failure before, and I’ll talk about that here in a second. But the truth is, there is no such thing as failure; it’s just a thought. And all of these are just thoughts. They’re just thoughts that we have. And if we think that our thoughts are facts, we can often again get into a situation where we have really high anxiety or things feel really icky. 

Another absolute black-and-white thinking that we do is that this is either easy or it’s impossible. There’s only those two choices. It should be either really easy or it’s not possible at all. Again, it’s going to get us into some trouble when we go to face our fears because facing fears is hard. We’ve talked about, it’s a beautiful day to do hard things. And the reason I say that is to really challenge this idea that things should be easy. And just because they’re hard doesn’t mean they’re impossible. Often people will say, “I can’t.” Again, just because they’re hard doesn’t mean that you can’t do it. It just might take some practice. 

So, these are common ways that black-and-white thinking shows up. And by now, if you’re listening, you’re probably thinking, “Oh yeah, I’ve been called out.” And that’s okay. We all do this type of thinking. But let’s talk about now tools and what you can do to target this. 

Let me tell you a story. Recently, I found myself managing what I would consider a crisis, a family crisis. It took several months for us to navigate this very, very difficult time. And I often leave voice recordings to my best friend. We communicate that way quite regularly. And every now and then, I listen back to what I’ve said to her just to hear myself and what I’m saying and where my head is. And I was shocked to hear me saying, “It’s always going to be this way. It’ll never get better. This is so bad. I failed. This is impossible. I can’t do this anymore.” I was doing all of the things. And for me, that awareness is what clicked me into like, “Oh, no wonder I’m panicking. No wonder I feel dread the minute I wake up in the morning because my story about this is exacerbating and making this harder on me. It’s creating more suffering.”

So the first thing I did is what I would tell my patients as well—to start with just a simple awareness training. Just being aware of when you do it. We don’t have to change anything. We’re not going to judge ourselves, but we’re just going to write down on a sticky note or an app on your phone every time you get caught in a black-and-white thinking, and we’re going to jot it down. “I always will feel this way. I will never get better. This will forever be a failure.” We want to just jot it down. And that is, in and of itself, a huge part of the work—just being aware when you catch it. We’re not here to come down hard on you for doing it. Sometimes it’s just a matter of going, “Oh, okay, Kimberley, I see that I’m doing black-and-white thinking.” And that might be all that we do. 

Often, with my patients, I will have them log this for homework because, in CBT, we do a lot of homework. And so I will say, “I want you to write it down and come back to me next week because next week, we’re going to work on the next tool.” 

Now this may be a little different depending on the condition, and I want to make sure I’m really thorough here. If you have GAD (generalized anxiety disorder) or panic, we do a lot of cognitive restructuring. We do a lot of cognitive restructuring about how you cope with your discomfort. And in some cases, we might even restructure the content of your thought. 

However, if you have OCD, it’s a little tiny bit different. We would still correct your thoughts about your ability to tolerate discomfort or your thoughts about yourself. But we want to be careful because sometimes when we start looking too close at the thought and trying to make sense of it and trying to correct it too much, we can actually start to be doing a little nuanced, subtle compulsion where we’re getting reassurance, we’re confessing, we are reinforcing the whole importance of this by going over it and correcting it, correcting it and correcting it. So just keep an eye out for that. If you’re in therapy, bring it up with your therapist just to make sure that you’re not using this skill today in a way that could become compulsive. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t, depends on the person. 

 For eating disorders, I know as my recovery from eating disorder, I did a lot of this, really examining, is my body all good or all bad? Is there such a thing as a perfect body or a failed body? This food or this body size, how do we determine its goodness or its badness? And looking at how extreme it can be. 

Now, another really important piece here is with depression. In depression, we use a lot of black-and-white thinking. “I’m all that. They’re all good. I’m a failure. I’ll never get better. It’ll never get better. Things will never look up. It’ll always be this way.” Depression loves to use black-and-white thinking. 

And so when we talk about cognitive restructuring, what we’re not talking about is just making it all positive. So here are a couple of examples. If you have depression, and for those of you, if you have depression and you don’t have access to a therapist, we have a whole online course called Overcoming Depression, where we go through this in depth of the common errors, not just black and white thinking, but the common errors in depression. And we work at coming up with helpful ways to respond. But one of the tools and skills that we use is, we don’t want to just come up with positive thoughts. It’s going to feel crappy to you. It’s going to feel fake. It’s not going to land. But what we want to do is find corrections or rebuttals to that thought that are more evidence-based, more rational, more logical, more helpful—things that might feel truer to you, even if it’s still somewhat distorted. It’s better than thinking in these absolutes because, like I said before, if you’re thinking in absolutes, you can guarantee you’re going to feel crummy. 

Another example is with GAD (generalized anxiety disorder) or with panic disorder. A lot of it is catching our appraisal of sensations and feelings in our body. Now, again, we actually have a whole course on this as well called Overcoming Anxiety and Panic. Again, we go through a whole module of cognitive restructuring where we identify the specific thoughts that people with generalized anxiety and panic have. And it will be looking for where you make these black-and-white, all-or-nothing statements that “It would be bad if that happened. I will always again feel this way. I’ll never amount to anything. This panic attack will never end. I’m not handling it well. I’m handling it all bad,” or that “This sensation is impossible, and I can’t tolerate it.” So we go through it and really look at what are the things that you’re worrying about, and how are you really bringing in black and white thinking? 

There are other distortions. In fact, there are 10 other distortions which we’re not covering today. Those are all in those courses as well. But again, for today, I wanted to really double down on this one. This one is particularly pesky and problematic. 

The other thing to remember as we’re looking at black-and-white thinking is to remember that usually, 99.999 % of the time, things happen in the middle, in the gray. I often will hear me say to clients, “Can you be a little more gray about that?” Not to say a little more dark and depressive. I’m saying gray in that, “Is there somewhere in the middle that is more true and factual? Is it all good or all bad or is it a little of both? Or is it none of either? Where in the middle does it land? Oh, you’re having the thought that you’re either successful or a failure? Where is everybody else in this continuum?” Most likely, they’re in the gray. Can you learn to be more comfortable accepting the gray of the world and not going to these absolute black-and-whites? 

The beauty is in the gray. We know this. The beauty is being kind to yourself in the gray, which brings me to the last point here, which is to practice self-compassion. We are in the gray. This podcast episode in and of itself is neither all bad nor all good. It’s going to be a variation, and a lot of that’s going to be dependent on people’s opinion, where they are, what they’re thinking, their mood, that things are really black and white. And can we be gentle with ourselves and humble enough to allow ourselves to see that this is neither good, bad, success, failure, always, never? These skills and the awareness of when we’re thinking this way can reduce a significant amount of our suffering, especially when you catch them, label them, and redirect in a kind, compassionate way. 

One thing I don’t want you to do is identify how you’re thinking in this black-and-white way and respond to that with black-and-white thinking by saying, “You’ll always think this way. You’ll never ever stop doing this.” Ironic, but we do it all the time. Almost always, when people criticize themselves, they’re using one of the two areas in thinking black and white thinking and labeling, which is like name calling. And again, we want to identify these areas in thinking. 

Again, if you want to go back and take a look at those courses, we go through this immensely in depth because there’s such an important part of Overcoming Anxiety and Panic and Overcoming Depression. And again, that’s the names of the courses. You can head over and look into that in the show notes, or go to CBTSchool.com. We have all of our courses listed there. 

All right, folks, that’s it. Please fix this error in thinking if you want to be less anxious. Black-and-white thinking will create so much suffering in your life. And my hope is that these episodes and the work we do here at Your Anxiety Toolkit make you suffer a little bit less each week. 

Have a great day, everyone, and I’ll see you next week.