Cognitive biases and cognitive distortions drive your perceptions and decision-making more than you may realize. I should know, as I’m someone who has lived with severe depression for over 30 years now.
It took me a long time to realize how that affected my overall perception and interpretation of the world. I suffered through numerous cognitive biases that painted the world as a very negative place to be.
A cognitive bias is simply a default, but erroneous way of thinking that can be both unhelpful and unhealthy. It’s a shortcut your brain takes to avoid overload, which leads to inaccurate perceptions and, often, choices.
Cognitive distortions are habitual mental filters that warp how you view events, yourself, and the world.
Together, they create powerful mind traps that can cause you to see the worst in everything.
The good news is that they can be challenged if you can start to notice and interrupt them. With that in mind, here are some of the biggest culprits to look out for.
8 cognitive traps that drive worst-case thinking:
1. Negativity bias means you give more weight to the bad stuff.
The negativity bias is our brain’s tendency to pay the most attention to negativity. It served our caveman ancestors well, but not so much now.
And it’s something that news networks and manipulative people often lean on to farm engagement. They feed you awful stories or make you angry because you are more likely to pay attention to negative ragebait. Not only that, but you’re more likely to come back to it later, increasing retention.
I had to actively retrain my brain to look for the good in the world, because I was so used to seeing the awful that I began to assume the worst. I was under the mistaken impression that optimists were just naive and blind to the suffering of the world.
In truth, many optimists I’ve known are just people who could look at a situation and see the possibility for a better outcome. And there is always a possibility.
2. Confirmation bias means you find what you’re looking for (and you’re already looking for the negative).
Confirmation bias often goes along with negativity bias. That is, confirmation bias is our tendency to find the things that we’re looking for to confirm our beliefs, and because of the negativity bias, we’re already looking for the bad.
In other words, if you look for the awful in the world, you’re absolutely going to find it because it’s everywhere. You’re more likely to notice the negative in the world, so it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You expect negativity, so you find it and confirm your initial beliefs, which causes you to look for more.
Breaking this cycle is challenging because it’s so easy to find information to confirm your own bias.
I had to specifically start looking for the exact opposite of whatever horrible stuff my brain was telling me was true.
For example, when something bad happened, I made the conscious decision to spend more time thinking about all of the people who stepped in to help and the goodness they put into the world than the people involved in the bad thing.
3. Catastrophizing turns tiny problems into huge ones.
Do you find that your brain jumps to the worst thoughts possible and stays there?
That is catastrophizing, and it’s a cognitive distortion that often comes with the cognitive biases we’ve already mentioned.
Anxiety often fuels catastrophizing because anxiety tends to cause your brain to focus on extremes. If one little thing goes wrong, anxiety can blow it up into a much larger problem than it actually is.
Yes, the worst-case scenario may happen. However, the best-case scenario could also happen, yet we don’t give nearly as much thought or attention to the possibility of everything working out.
The negativity bias and confirmation bias will naturally guide your perceptions back to the catastrophic if you aren’t aware enough to challenge them.
4. Overgeneralization creates patterns where patterns don’t exist.
We often engage in generalization because our brains are predisposed to looking for patterns. That’s a good thing, because patterns can help us identify threats and keep us safe.
However, that can easily go wrong because you can easily overgeneralize similar situations and create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
For example, Luna may have gotten out of a relationship where she was cheated on. She gets into a new relationship and sees some benign behavior that her cheating ex also used to engage in, so she associates it with cheating and starts assuming that’s what is going on.
She’s overgeneralized to the worst-case scenario, but it may not be that at all.
Not every behavior that coincides with cheating necessarily means the person is cheating. But if Luna jumps immediately to that conclusion, she may start a fight that damages her relationship, thus driving her new partner away anyway.
5. Recency bias means your last experience overshadows everything else.
Our brains often get stuck on what happened recently.
To go back to Luna’s example, a lot of people exit relationships where there was infidelity, feeling betrayed and even distrusting themselves.
As a result, they can wrongfully conclude that because their most recent partner cheated on them, their next partner will too.
But that’s not something that anyone can know ahead of time. You just won’t know until it happens, assuming it ever does, which it may not.
Sure, it’s helpful to look back at recent circumstances to try to sort out what may have gone wrong. However, it’s not helpful to try to determine the future from the past.
6. Fundamental attribution error makes you judge the person rather than their behavior.
Some people make the mistake of viewing a person’s negative behavior as evidence of their true character. This is what’s known as a fundamental attribution error.
The truth is that people sometimes do bad things, but that doesn’t mean that they are bad people. We get emotional, we act on that emotion, and then we regret it later.
That doesn’t make it right, but it’s also not evidence that they are a bad person.
It’s evidence that they may have done a bad thing, but who among us has not?
I know I’ve done plenty of regrettable things before I knew better, but my character allowed me to learn and grow from them. On the other hand, if I were a bad person, I just wouldn’t care, or worse, I would see it as a good thing.
7. Hindsight bias makes past pain look predictable.
It’s easy to conclude that an outcome was obvious when you’re looking back on it. Take a health issue with ambiguous symptoms, for example.
It wasn’t clearcut at the time. It would be impossible to know ahead of time whether or not those symptoms meant something serious or not.
But we still like to look back on situations and say things like, “Oh, it was totally obvious that was going to happen.”
And hey, maybe it was. Maybe there were signs as clear as day. But there might not have been. It may not have been obvious at all, yet now, because of hindsight bias, you’re assuming all future experiences will follow the same pattern.
8. Probability neglect means you focus on what could go wrong rather than whether it’s likely.
Have you ever found yourself completely disregarding the likelihood of something happening and instead focusing on whether or not it could go wrong, and how badly?
That’s called probability neglect, and it’s less helpful than you might imagine. Focusing on whether or not something can go wrong is a waste of time because ANYTHING can go wrong. There are no certainties in life, other than death and taxes.
So why should you spend your time drowning and worrying about whether or not something could go wrong, especially when it’s something unlikely?
You shouldn’t. There’s just no guarantee that you’ll be able to predict it even if you have all of the information in the world.
And even if you do predict it, you may not be able to do anything about it anyway. Instead, it’s a better idea to focus on how to maximize your chances of success and put your energy there.
Closing thoughts…
There are so many cognitive traps that fuel the negative thoughts we have. They cause us to focus on everything that goes wrong in life, moving like a swift current in the ocean.
It takes a lot of energy to find a way to swim against that current when you’re struggling with your mental health.
If you’re someone with mental health issues, you may need professional help to get those thoughts under control.
You can retrain your brain not to default to these negative biases, but it is not an easy task. However, it’s so worthwhile because it will ultimately help you be a happier, healthier person.
