• All or nothing thinking - sometimes called 'black and white thinking'
  • "If I'm not perfect I have failed."
  • "Either I do it right or not at all."
• Mental filter - only paying attention to certain types of evidence
  • Noticing our failures but not seeing our successes
• Jumping to conclusions - falls into two key types
  • Mind reading - imagining we know what others are thinking
  • Fortune telling - predicting the future
• Emotional reasoning - assuming that because we feel a certain way what we think must be true
  • "I feel embarrassed so I must be an idiot"
• Labeling - assigning labels to ourselves or other people
  • "I'm a loser."
  • "I'm completely useless."
  • "They're such an idiot."
• Overgeneralizing - seeing a pattern based upon a single event, or being overly broad in the conclusions we draw
  • "Everything is always rubbish."
  • "Nothing good ever happens."
• Disqualifying the positive - discounting the good things that have happened or that you have done for some reason or another
  • "That doesn't count."
• Magnification (catastrophising) and minimization - blowing things out of proportion, or inappropriately shrinking something to make something less important
• Critical words like "should", "must" or "ought" - can make us feel guilty or like we have already failed
  • Also, if we apply "shoulds" to other people the result is often frustration.
• Personalization - placing blame
  • Blaming yourself, taking responsibility for something that wasn't completely your fault.
  • Conversely, blaming other people for something that was your fault.

Some notes

• My psychiatrist has given me three copies of this poster at different times. Time to refer to it regularly.
• My own inferences:
  • Identifying unhelpful thinking styles != passing moral judgment
  • I tend towards mental filter, disqualifying the positive and personalization.
  • There are lots of overlaps, so an instance of unhelpful thinking falls under multiple styles. (It doesn't mean its a lot worse, though.)