![]() It starts with an awareness of your internal dialogue, storytelling, and cognitive processes. Metacognition refers to intentionally noticing automatic patterns of thought. You can learn to manage all-or-nothing thinking patterns by: 1. If automatic thoughts can influence how you feel, you can learn to shift your thinking patterns by looking at your thoughts instead of through them. “If you’re anticipating it’s never going to improve, it never will.”ĥ tips to manage all-or-nothing thinking tendencies “It limits your ability to see the exceptions that exist,” she adds. It can also set unrealistic expectations and stunt opportunities for growth, Dyer says. If I had told someone sooner, my mom would be OK.” Relationship conflictĪll-or-nothing thinking patterns can affect interpersonal dynamics, from how you see your relationship to how you view the other person. “The child may see their mom is negatively impacted because of what happened, and think: ‘It’s my fault. These traumatic events can impact the way you organize and interpret information from your surroundings.Ĭhildren sometimes blame themselves for how a traumatic experience has also affected the family. The all-or-nothing cognitive distortion may be linked to experiences of trauma, especially in childhood. “Everything is terrible nothing good ever happens.”.“I never feel happy I always feel sad.”.“It’s hard to identify alternatives.”Įxamples of all-or-nothing thinking in this scenario may include: “When we feel hopeless, we become stuck in the feeling,” explains Dyer. People living with symptoms of depression may tend to use all-or-nothing thinking, alongside catastrophizing and overgeneralization. “My alarm didn’t go off, I will cancel the meeting.”.“I can’t finish everything, I won’t do anything.”.Conscious or not, it may promote making excuses to reduce effort. “There’s no middle ground of, ‘I like my eyes, and I’d like to change my smile.'” Motivation and self-defeating behaviorsĪn all-or-nothing mentality may lead to avoidant behaviors. ![]() Judging yourself based on the extremes of love and hate can make it hard to identify features you like about your body, Dyer added. “Or, ‘If I looked like her, I’d love my body.’” “When a teen sees retouched images on social media, an automatic thought may be: ‘My body doesn’t look like this I hate my body,’” adds Dyer. For example, “If I don’t always get an A in my exams, I’m a failure.”Īppearance, and social comparison, are other examples of how all-or-nothing thinking may affect self-perception, says Dyer. It may lead you to give into all-or-nothing perfectionism. When evaluating your achievements, polarized thinking can reinforce a binary of success or failure. “Our thinking directly impacts our emotional state, and how we behave is based on our thinking and emotions,” explains Dyer.Īll-or-nothing thinking has been associated with symptoms of:Įxamples of all-or-nothing thinking in different scenarios Self-perception “There are no other possibilities.”Ĭognitive distortions, in general, may affect your mood and the way you behave. ![]() “It’s between two extremes,” according to Paige Dyer, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Gainesville, Florida. Also known as polarized, dichotomous, or black-and-white thinking, it’s the tendency to see things as “either/or.” The all-or-nothing distortion involves perceiving the world as a binary - a pair of opposites. It may make you see your world more negatively than it really is. All-or-nothing thinking is a cognitive distortion often linked to negative thinking, anxiety, and low mood.Ī cognitive distortion is a pattern of thoughts that most often is not based on facts. ![]()
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