💬 Personal Reflection

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about thoughts.

As I continue to work hard to achieve my goals and aspirations, I’ve become annoyed with dealing with a specific type… Intrusive or negative thoughts.

This book refers to them as automatic thoughts because “they run through your mind automatically without the slightest effort on your part to put them there.“

Negative thoughts are illogical, self-defeating, and pessimistic by nature.

And when they go unchallenged, they can “cripple your self-image, paralyze your willpower and lower your mood.”

After reading multiple self-help books, I still had one question unanswered…

Do I have a self-esteem problem? If so, how do I fix it?

Without a true answer to this question, I decided to re-read a book that I knew had helped me during my most challenging times.

The biggest takeaway I took from this book is that…

To develop a sense of self-esteem, the first step is to stop your overly critical inner dialogue.

“You don’t have to do anything especially worthy to create or deserve self-esteem.”

All you have to do is turn off that overly critical inner dialogue as “your internal self-abuse springs from illogical, distorted thinking.”

Hope this helps,

-Agustin

📖 Book Notes

In this book, David D. Burns, M.D., popularized cognitive therapy, an approach to mood modification without the use of drugs.

Many consider the findings in this book a major development in the scientific study of psychotherapy and personal change.

For many years, traditional methods for treating depression were considered slow and ineffective.

Today, this form of therapy has caught on in a big way among mental health professionals and the general public.

A fundamental idea in cognition therapy is understanding the relationship between the world and how we feel.

As described in the book…

“It is not the actual events but your perceptions that result in mood changes.”

The revolutionary premise of cognition therapy is the understanding that when we experience excessive negative emotions, thoughts begin to distort.

They become “illogical, unrealistic, or just plain wrong.”

These are otherwise known as cognitive distortions, and there are ten of them mentioned in this book…

1. All-or-nothing thinking: This refers to your tendency to evaluate your personal qualities in extreme black-or-white categories.

2. Overgeneralization: You arbitrarily conclude that one thing that happened to you once will occur repeatedly.

3. Mental Filter: You pick out a negative detail in any situation and dwell on it exclusively, thus perceiving the whole situation as negative.

4. Disqualifying the positive: Transforming the neutral or even positive experiences into negative ones.

5. Jumping to conclusions: Jumping to a negative conclusion that is not justified by the facts of the situation.

6. Magnification and minimization: When you look at your own errors, fears, or imperfections and exaggerate their importance and when you think of your strengths, you may do the opposite.

7. Emotional Reasoning: I feel guilty; therefore, I must have done something wrong. This is misleading because your thoughts might be distorted, thus affecting the way you feel.

8. Should statements: Set realistic expectations of people or always feel let down by human behaviour.

9. Labelling and mislabeling: This is an extreme overgeneralization, “I’m a…”.

10. Personalization: You confused influence with control. You assume responsibility for a negative even when there is no basis for doing so.

Overall, this is a good book to read to learn more about cognitive therapy, a technique for categorizing negative thoughts and replacing them with more objective ones.

I recommend reading this book if you are looking for a practical approach to fixing your obsessive negative talk and fighting back.

You can expect to learn topics such as the cause of your mood swings, building self-esteem, and overcoming negative emotions.

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