What happens when your perceptions – or your interpretations of those perceptions – don’t align with what actually occurs? This is known as irrational thinking, and it can undermine your efforts to live a productive and satisfying life. Thankfully, there are steps you can take to minimize your maladaptive thought patterns and adopt a healthier perspective.
How to Define Irrational Thinking
Irrational thoughts are mental processes that don’t lead to logical conclusions or align with objective reality. They are sometimes also referred to as cognitive distortions.
At their most extreme, irrational thoughts can become delusions, or rigid, unrealistic beliefs that you cling to even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
More common, yet still disruptive, forms of irrational thinking include skewed, self-defeating ways of evaluating yourself, assessing information, and considering the world around you.
Types of irrational thinking include:
- Catastrophizing: Looking at situations from a “worst possible outcome” standpoint, even if the negative results that you envision are highly unlikely to occur
- Overgeneralizations: Making broad judgments or drawing firm conclusions based on one experience or a solitary piece of evidence
- All-or-nothing thinking: Dividing people, events, and experiences into distinct good/bad or success/failure categories, with no in between
- Personalization: Blaming yourself for events that were either completely beyond your control, or that you were only tangentially involved in
- Filtering: Considering only positive (or negative) evidence while ignoring any data that suggests the opposite
- Magnification: Taking one event (such as failing a test) and accepting it as proof of a greater truth (in this case, that you are a failure)
- Emotional reasoning: Believing that if you feel strongly about something, then it must be true
- Blaming: Asserting that the actions of other people are responsible for your emotions
We’ll discuss a few examples of irrational thoughts, and the harm they can cause, a bit later in this post.
What Causes Irrational Thoughts?
There is no single, universal cause of irrational thoughts. Instead, there are many factors that can increase a person’s risk of viewing themselves and their environment through a distorted lens.
Irrational thoughts can be symptoms of several mental health conditions, including:
- Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD)
- Specific phobia
- Panic disorder
- Separation anxiety disorder
- Depression
- Bipolar disorder
- Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
- Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)
- Personality disorders
- Schizophrenia
Irrational thinking may also be associated with low self-esteem, a lack of self-confidence, and a history of abuse, neglect, or other traumatic experiences.
How Can You Stop Irrational Thinking?
You don’t have to let self-defeating thoughts continue to hold you hostage. Here are a few ways that you can take back control:
- Practice mindfulness, which includes feeling your feelings and observing your surroundings without judging or reacting to them. Mindfulness reminds you that your thoughts and emotions are not permanent, and that you can choose whether to act on them or not. This practice also encourages you to remain fully present in the moment, which can help you break free from the compulsion to catastrophize or dwell on past difficulties.
- Keep a journal. Recording your thoughts, experiences, and emotions requires you to consider them from the perspective of an observer. This can diminish their power over you and help you identify maladaptive patterns. Also, if you are prone to catastrophizing, magnifying, or filtering, keeping a journal can push you to consider evidence and context that you were initially unable or unwilling to acknowledge.
- Find healthy ways to manage stress. If you have a bad day at work, then come home and fixate on what went wrong for the rest of the evening, this may only serve to inflate the problem in your mind. This invites catastrophizing, magnifying, overgeneralizations, and all-or-nothing thinking. If, instead, you go for a walk, meditate, work in your garden, or engage in another healthy activity that improves your mood, you may realize that the difficulties of the day no longer have any power over you.
- Get professional help. If your irrational thinking is related to a mental health disorder, professional treatment may be the ideal option for you. As valuable as self-care can be, it has its limitations. In certain circumstances, you may need the guidance of a counselor, therapist, or other provider to help you develop a healthier mindset.
Problems That Thinking Irrationally Can Cause
Irrational thoughts can lead to poor decisions and ill-advised behaviors, which in turn can have a detrimental impact at home, in school, at work, in the context of your friendships and romantic relationships, and in many other parts of your life.
Here are just a few examples:
- Catastrophizing can prevent you from pursuing additional education, moving to a new town, or applying for a different job. If you believe that taking even small risks to improve your life will backfire, you can find yourself trapped in an unsatisfying job, a dysfunctional relationship, or other less-than-ideal circumstances.
- Catastrophizing can also cause you to delay seeking medical care. If you assume that an examination or an assessment will reveal a life-threatening condition, you might be afraid to schedule an appointment. Of course, health issues don’t disappear simply because you ignore them. Instead, they will continue to weigh on your mind — and in the absence of proper care, they may morph from treatable concerns into the serious problems that you initially feared.
- All-or-nothing thinking and magnification can stop you from enjoying a better quality of life. Everyone encounters setbacks and failures. If you see these experiences as opportunities to learn and adapt, they can fuel your future successes. But if you believe that coming up short even once is proof that you are inherently flawed, you can deny yourself the chance to discover how much you are truly capable of accomplishing.
- An overgeneralization based on one bad date could stop you from pursuing future relationships, while an overgeneralization based on a single subpar travel experience could preclude you from exploring new places and developing an appreciation for other cultures.
- Emotional reasoning and filtering can cause you to develop a warped view of the world and an inflexible, abrasive attitude. Being unwilling or unable to change your opinion or even consider alternate viewpoints can impede your progress in school or at work and isolate you from peers and colleagues.
Start Treating Mental Health at Montare
If you have been experiencing irrational thoughts due to an anxiety disorder, PTSD, or another mental health concern, Montare Behavioral Health is here to help.
We offer a full continuum of customized mental health treatment services at several convenient locations throughout Southern California. At every facility within the Montare network, you can work in close collaboration with a team of skilled and compassionate professionals.
We will help you identify the source of your irrational thinking, then develop a personalized plan that can put you on the path toward a much healthier and more satisfying future.
When you’re ready to get started, the Montare Behavioral Health team is here for you. To learn more or to schedule a free assessment, please visit our Contact page or call us today.