Coping with Stressors

We all experience stress in our lives. However, many people think that stress is a bad thing, when it is actually a good thing. It makes you stronger, like putting weight on your muscles and bones when you walk. It becomes a problem when stress turns into distress and you start complaining about your problems because you cannot handle them. If you use stress to grow and develop, it makes you stronger, but if you do not grow from it and instead you let it consume you, it will destroy you.

People often times allow these thoughts to overtake them; the main culprit behind this is overthinking. Dr. David Burns came up with the concept of "The Ten Forms of Twisted Thinking", where he defined ten things that cause us to have thoughts that consume us when we face a crisis. The first is all-or-nothing thinking which is where someone thinks that because they did one thing wrong, they are a lost cause. Something else that causes this is overgeneralization which is when someone thinks that because something was an outcome once, that will always be the outcome. People may also experience a mental filter which is where one negative event is all that they can think about, and their life becomes defined by this single event. Another form of twisted thinking is discounting the positive. This leads to people thinking that even when they did a good job, they could have done better, so they ignore the fact that they did do a good job. The next way someone may experience twisted thinking is by jumping to conclusions, which is when you assume something is negative when it is not true. This is then split into two other categories: mind reading and fortune-telling. Mind-reading occurs when you assume people are thinking negative thoughts, but in reality they are not. Fortune-telling is when you assume that something bad is going to happen. 

Magnification is when you make your problems huge and your accomplishments tiny. Emotional reasoning is when you think that because you feel a certain negative emotion, that determines your reality. Another tool people use are "should statements". You think back on a certain situation and think about what you should have done instead of just accepting that what happened, is what happened, and that it is going to be OK. When people label, they tell themselves over and over that they are something negative (a looser, worthless, a jerk) instead of saying that they did something negative. Finally, personalization and blame is when you say that something is all your fault even though it is not. You take all of the blame, even though you only deserve a little blame, if even any.

I have found myself using these forms of thinking in my own life. One of my major stressor is the fact that I will go over conversations that I have had with people to see if I said anything I shouldn't have said. I will use should statements and think I should have done something differently. I will feel guilty about something that I said, so I will label myself and say things like "I'm the worst". If something goes wrong in a situation I will blame myself and say that it is my fault that it went wrong. Even if I said a lot of the right things, I will only focus on the one dumb thing that I said. When I say all of these negative things, my worldview becomes negative and I can often times be consumed by this. Finally, the biggest things I am guilty of is jumping to conclusions. I always think that I know what others are thinking during our conversations (mind reading) and do not say things because of how people will react (fortune-telling).

I did not realize that I did all of these things until I read this article. However now that I realize what I do, I can work harder to stop myself for thinking this way so I will not feel so much distress.