[music playing]

Richard: Cognitive distortions are irrational thoughts that people may have when it comes to thinking about certain problems that they have.

Lana: Cognitive distortions are different kinds of irrational thinking.

[music playing]

Artis: Overgeneralization, they just think that once certain aspect of a whole category will define the entire category depending on their experience. Saying that they had a bad experience in the whole category is corrupt. Such as one bad apple spoils the barrel.

Richard: Another example, you could say that just because you had one bad experience that means the rest of forever that experience is going to be bad throughout your life. So I went to a concert. And say somebody elbowed me in the face or something. Or somebody spilled beer on my shirt. Well, not going to any more concerts because that's probably going to happen to me again.

[music playing]

Lana: All or nothing thinking is when the individual thinks extremes on both ends. So it's either everything's perfect or everything's awful. There's no sort of middle ground.

My sister, she kind of displays some all or nothing thinking. So if we have a really fun day. And we go to the mall and stuff. But there's one thing that goes wrong, she kind of flips the whole mood to be a bad day.

[music playing]

Girl: An example of catastrophizing would be, I miss shift for work. And I automatically think, I'm going to get fired. When really I've had no prior offenses. I would just be over catastrophizing that.

[music playing]

Madison: An example for the mental filtering would be, one year me and my friends went to Daytona for spring break. And we stayed in a hotel room on the beach. And it was about $300 a night and there were bugs in our hotel room.

So we asked to switch hotel rooms. And they let us switch rooms. Everything went fine and everything. And then when we go back to talk about the trip and everything, that one friend can only pick out the negative part.

So she only talks about how they are bugs in the room. Not about how we actually had fun and all this other stuff. It was just that one bad thing. So it made our whole trip bad.

[music playing]

Monique: Personalization is basically blaming yourself for an event that's going on. And example of personalization that I have from when I was younger, I used to always believe that it was my fault for my mother's sadness. Because we were biracial.

So I figured if all of her kids were Caucasian then she'd be happier. So when I would see her cry I would think that we were the reason for her sadness. So that was something that I took personal. But really wasn't my fault.

Madison: I think therapists help patients recognize cognitive distortions because they can get a different outside perspective. Because as humans, we don't really see exactly what we're doing. We may not understand it.

And so a therapist might be able to show us what we're doing when we don't understand or we don't know. They can give you a different perspective. And give you tools and skills to help work on that and help you realize when you're actually doing that. So you can help stop yourself.

[music playing]