When suffering depression, you'll feel really weak and worthless for the things you experience. Moreover, you'll feel negatively about almost everything. This passage hereby introduces several different types of negative thoughts affecting depression. Those negative thoughts include: overgeneralization, bias, black and white thinking etc.
Overgeneralization:
When you generalize everything based on a single negative event. You can’t judge everything by that one event and need to learn a way forward that helps you to see things as they really are.
Bias against the Positive:
A mental filter keeps you from considering positive events. Whatever positive happens, your mind tends to mark it as unimportant, or doesn't register it at all. You need to learn to bias your thoughts toward the positive and that’s what we intend to teach you with this book.
Jumping To Conclusions:
When you jump to negative conclusions without any actual evidence, like what opinion someone might have about you. Learn to observe. Learn to wait before making assumptions because sometimes, you may actually surprise yourself. Your conclusions, when you are depressed, are always going to be biased toward the negative and it’s important that you don’t act on your first instincts in this particular case.
Black and White Thinking:
Seeing everything in black and white, without considering the subtle shades of gray everywhere can be harmful. Striving for utmost perfection and beating yourself up for not achieving it can lead to depression. Life isn’t black and white and when you start to see all the subtleties, you actually grow as a person and find that life offers you a lot more than the black and white image that you keep seeing. Be patient, your life is about to become very colorful indeed.
Looking for Catastrophe:
No, just because the pilot said there’s some turbulence doesn’t mean the plane is going to crash. Looking for catastrophe makes our brains jump to the worst case scenario. It’s much the same in relationships and in communication. You expect the worst because your depressed mind tells you to. However, we are going to show you how to see the cup half full instead of always assuming that it’s half empty. The doom and gloom type of person will always see negative things and these will affect the way that depression touches your life. You also need to see outcomes that are much more positive because these help you to trust life again.
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