All-or-Nothing Thinking
What is Cognitive Distortion?
Cognitive distortions are negative or faulty patterns of thinking. These negative thought patterns can play a role in diminishing your motivation, lowering your self-esteem, and contributing to problems like anxiety, depression, and substance use. It also leads to disturbance in life, work, and relationships.
Types of Cognitive Distortion
There can be many cognitive distortions. Some of the most common are as follows:
Engaging in catastrophic thinking: This occurs when you expect the worst outcome. For example, if your boss asks for a call, you worry you will be fired, and homeless.
Discounting the positive: You avoid positive events in your life and often denies the credit. Say, you get a promotion. You acknowledge it as sheer luck or mistake.
Emotional reasoning: You lean on your gut feeling more than factual evidences. For example, “I feel like I’m a bad friend, therefore I must be a bad friend”.
Labeling and mislabeling: You tend to label/mislabel based on one past event. You failed a math test at high school, so you’re “stupid”.
Overgeneralization: People who overgeneralize apply their experience from one event to another. If your relationship ended in breakup, you think you’re not worthy of love. As a result, you might conclude you should never date again.
Black-and-white or All-or-Nothing Thinking: This kind of distortion often delas with extremes. It doesn’t consider the balanced perspective or in betweens. People will be either good or bad. Life is either great ot terrible.
In this article, we talk more about All-or-Nothing Thinking only.
All-or-Nothing Thinking
As we discussed above, all-or-nothing thinking is a cognitive distortion, which is an irrational pattern of thinking. All-or-nothing thinking sees the world in extremes, with one outcome being good & the other bad. There’s no view of the nuances, of a balanced perspective, or the bigger picture. One way that we tend to use all-or-nothing thinking is about ourselves. We take one event and conclude it out, labeling ourselves as bad (in all sorts of different ways) in the process:
If you don’t achieve a goal… you’re a failure.
If you can’t help a friend with something… you’re a bad person.
If you make a mistake… you’re worthless.
If you don’t get a task done… you’re lazy.
If someone doesn’t like you… you’re unloveable.
If you haven’t gotten a job yet… you’re never going to.
How to come out of All-or-Nothing Thinking
To address it, we can start by paying attention to the voice in our heads. Take note of the words used, and write them down to make them salient. Once you identify your typical talk track, you can start to hear it far more clearly.
Then, introspect the voice. Look for evidence that disproves your all-or-nothing response. Our brains have a negativity bias that inclines us to focus on what went wrong, which means we have to actively look for the things that might have gone right. Maybe you didn’t get that one task done today — but think about all that you did do instead. Maybe you couldn’t help your friend with what they needed — but you prioritized something else that matters to you. Zoom out. Recognize that there is a wide range of interpretations that exist between the extremes.
Ask yourself, ‘what’s another way to look at this?’ or ‘what’s another way I could interpret this event?’ Finally, practice self-compassion. Holding ourselves to a standard of perfection is so harmful to our well-being. There is always a third option in between. Focus on what went good rather than what should went good. Recognise that these things are inevitable: we will not achieve goals, we will not be able to help all of the time, we will make mistakes, we won’t get all of our tasks done, not everyone will like us, and we will struggle to make things happen. These do not indicate that we are bad; they indicate that we are human.
