One of the goals of this program is to become aware of and curious about your thoughts, particularly at times when you experience intense emotions. Doing so, gives you a chance to step back and ask first off, “Have I fallen into a thinking trap” and if so, “What information might I be missing? How would someone else in this situation interpret what’s going on?”
If you read through all the examples and found yourself thinking, “I do all or most of them! I must be really messed up!”, don’t worry, we all do most of them from time to time and we usually have some thinking (cognitive) traps that we fall into more often than others. The problem is when we use them rigidly and frequently.
As you work through this section, learning which ones get you into trouble most often will give you a chance when you’re experiencing a strong emotion to see if you’ve fallen into a ‘trap’ and to look for information that you might have missed. This is why it’s so important to practice being aware of what you’re thinking, when you’re thinking it.
You can use the Identifying Thinking Traps form in situations when you notice your emotions are intense, to identify and rate your emotions, and then identify any cognitive traps that you might have fallen into.
Sample
Identifying Thinking Traps Form |
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| Emotion (0-100) | Thought | Cognitive Trap |
| Happy | All or none | |
| Sad | Catastrophizing | |
| Anxious / Scared / Nervous | Dismissing or discounting the positive | |
| Ashamed | Emotional reasoning | |
| Angry | Labeling | |
| Frustration | Magnification | |
| Guilty | Mind-reading/fortune telling | |
| Other | Overgeneralizing | |
| Personalization | ||
| Should, must statements | ||
| Hindsight bias | ||
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