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Thinking traps: how unhelpful thoughts keep us stuck in a rut

What are thinking traps? They are negative patterns of thought that can hinder our ability to see the “bigger picture”.

When we engage in unhelpful thinking, unpleasant emotions such as sadness and anxiety frequently follow. These unhelpful thoughts can make us more likely to jump to conclusions and react impulsively. Although we all experience these thoughts to some degree, when they occur frequently, they can increase anxiety and low mood and make it hard to cope with life’s challenges.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is based on the theory that thoughts and behaviours significantly impact mood and emotions. In other words, if we can make changes to the way we think and behave, we can influence the way we feel, helping us to better navigate the world. As a result, it is important to identify our thoughts and check our thinking traps. We can then challenge and eventually change the thoughts that are driving our low mood, anxiety, and other emotions. Below is a list of some of the common thinking traps we can experience.

Thinking Traps

• Magnification and Minimisation: over or under-estimating the importance of events. For example, your teacher asks you a question and you find yourself thinking “everyone is staring at me”.


• Catastrophizing: expecting the worst possible outcome from a situation. Problems may be interpreted as huge and overwhelming and negative events may become more important or serious than they really are. For example, you feel anxious and notice your heart is racing and think: “I’m going to have a heart attack and die”.


• Overgeneralisation: believing that negative events will keep happening repeatedly. An example could be saying, “why does this always happen to me?”.


• Mind-reading: immediately assuming that you know what others are thinking and that they are viewing you in a negative light (without having any evidence of this) e.g., “She wouldn’t go on a date with me. She probably thinks I’m ugly”.


• Fortune telling (predicting the future): expecting a certain outcome and thinking that you know what will happen, without appropriate evidence e.g., “I’m probably going to fail all my exams”.


• Disqualifying the positive (“mental filter”): focussing attention on the negative aspects of a situation and disregarding the positive.


• Emotional reasoning: being ruled by emotion when responses to a situation are dictated by feelings. For example, the only evidence that something bad is going to happen is that you feel something bad is going to happen.


• Labelling: wrongly attributing a negative label to either yourself or someone else e.g., “I’m stupid”.


• “Should” statements: using “I should” or “I shouldn’t” statements can place unreasonable demands on you, setting unrealistic expectations. For example, you’re about to give a presentation and think: “I shouldn’t be feeling anxious”, when this is a very normal and natural reaction.


• Black and white/all-or-nothing thinking: thinking in extreme ways where there is nothing in between the extremes. You feel you are either good or bad, right or wrong etc. and tend to use words like “always”, “never”, or “every”.

We have a constant stream of thoughts running through our minds. It’s like our self-talk which constantly comments (often without being aware of it) on what has happened, what we are doing and what we will do. It’s common for our thinking to sometimes be negative and unhelpful. We all fall into this trap at times, but some people get stuck and before they know it, the unhelpful thinking spirals and impacts on their mood and behaviour. This is why it’s so important to catch unhelpful ways of thinking and to check whether we are making things out to be worse than they really are. The aim is to develop more positive, balanced and helpful ways of thinking.

Over the next week, as soon as you notice a change in how you’re feeling, try to catch your thoughts and see if they are helpful or unhelpful to you. It’s useful to write the thoughts down and ask yourself the following questions:

• What am I thinking about myself?
• What am I thinking about others or the way they are treating me?
• What do I think may happen?

Don’t worry if at first, you can’t find any thoughts. Just write down as much as you can about what happened, who was there, what was said and how you felt. Once you become aware of your thoughts, check to see if you have fallen into any of the thinking traps listed above. You may find that there are particular thinking traps that you fall in to more than others. Catching and checking your thinking traps is the first important step in helping you practise the skill of developing more balanced thinking. Once skilled in this area, the next step will be to learn to challenge and change the way you think. This will be covered in a future blog!

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Article date 14th December 2021

Article written by Imogen Clifford, Assistant Psychologist, Bristol CBT Clinic