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Let’s go back to the interpretations we discovered in our second circle.

When you look at these interpretations, chances are that they are mostly negative.

Ask yourself: how are these interpretations making me feel? Are they helping or hindering me from mental and emotional wellbeing?

Next question: when I am having these negative feelings and interpretations, how is that causing me to behave? Towards myself? Towards others?

If they are, in fact, making me feel upset or causing distress in relationships, am I willing to consider other, more helpful interpretations?

A very effective way to get back to mental and emotional stability is this little exercise:

On a piece of paper, draw two circles. Label the first one: What Happened and the second one: What I made it mean.

Now in the first circle write down a situation when you were upset with someone: someone did not respond to your text, did not return an email or a phone call, they spoke to you in a loud voice, said something, did not greet you on your birthday etc. etc. etc. What you write here should be observable on a video screen by anybody watching.

Next, in the second circle, write down all your interpretations: the labels you have put on them, the judgements you are passing, the meaning...

So instead of reacting to everything that we think, we can become unbiased observers of our thoughts.

When bad thoughts arise, (and they WILL), we can say, "It's interesting that I think that."

When good thoughts arise, we can say, "It's interesting that I think that."

Just watch your thoughts come and go, come and go, come and go.

When we practice observing thoughts rather than treating them as TRUE and then reacting, we can remain in control and not react based on our mental events.

Be like the ocean – underneath the waves, it is still, calm, unmoving.

Since thoughts are merely interpretations of events, why not choose more helpful interpretations? Why not choose interpretations that would make us feel good about ourselves and others rather than bring us down and cause us to blame and disconnect from our loved ones?

So the next time you catch yourself having a cognitive distortion, you may find it helpful to ask yourself: what are the facts?

Pretend that you are a lawyer (or a scientist) when you’re challenging your thoughts. The best lawyers and scientists generally don’t use feelings or opinions to win their argument – they stick to the facts (the evidence). Facts are those things, behaviours and events that you can see on a video screen.

For example, if you catch yourself thinking that you are a bad...

Think of the negative thinking patterns that we have been talking about like weeds. Leave them alone or give them too much food and they are likely to take over, set deep roots and crowd out the flowers or positive thoughts. The longer you let them run wild, the harder it will be to get rid of them and the worse the state of your garden.

Over the last few weeks we have been, in a sense, examining the landscape of our garden and surveying the weeds. We have examined them, discovered the species that are growing roots in our garden and learnt about how they operate.

It is now time to start taking action to clear our garden of weeds so that the flowers may flourish.

Ready? (Or are you really really in love with the weeds? ;)

All of us engage in such thinking patterns from time to time and the more we begin to recognize them, the less hold they will have on us. This is how we can stop letting these thoughts control us and get back in charge.

Before we discuss some more ways we can combat these thinking patterns, here is a list of distortions that we talked about. You can click here to review any or all of them.

1. All or nothing thinking/polarized thinking [DW#488]
2. Overgeneralizations [DW#489]
3. Labeling [DW#490]
4. Catastrophizing [DW#491]
   1. Decatastrophizing [DW#492]
5. Minimization [DW#493]
6. Emotional reasoning [DW#494]
7. Shoulding yourself [DW#495]
8. Jumping to conclusions – mind reading [DW#496]
9. Jumping to conclusions – fortune telling [DW#497]
10. Personalization [DW#498]
11. Blaming...

All of us experience pain in our lives. Pain is what happens when an event or situation outside our control causes us distress. For example, we get a headache, our car breaks down, someone betrays our trust, we lose our job. All of these are events that cause pain.

Events such as these are the first darts that life throws at us.

The second darts are how we respond to these events, what we think about them and what we tell ourselves.

If our car breaks down for example, this would be the first dart.

Some examples of second darts are if we tell ourselves:

The reality of the situation is this: we cannot do anything about the fact our car...

A person who suffers from a self-serving bias will attribute all positive events or achievements to himself while seeing any negative events or mistakes as outside his control.

If I do well at work, it is my hard work.

If I mess up a project, it is my boss who did not give proper instructions.

If I am a good hostess, it is my own creativity and hard work.

If the food turns out bad, it is my children’s fault who distracted me while I was cooking.

If my relationship is going well, it is because I am such an awesome spouse.

If we are going through a difficult patch, it is because my spouse is being extraordinarily challenging.

This pattern of thinking causes a person to refuse to admit mistakes or flaws and to live in a distorted reality where he or she can do no wrong. 

Since self growth and emotional and spiritual maturity begins with...

With this distortion, the idea that we could be wrong is absolutely unacceptable, and we will fight to the metaphorical death to prove that we are right. We can see this distortion quite easily on social media platforms where people sometimes spend hours arguing with each other over an opinion or political issue far beyond the point where reasonable individuals would conclude that they should "agree to disagree". To them, it is not simply a matter of a difference of opinion, it is an intellectual battle that must be won at all costs. The idea that there may be another equally valid opinion is quite alien.

As you can imagine, always being right can make us slightly (!) insufferable, tiring and...

This pattern of thinking involves believing that we will be happy if people around us change to accommodate our wishes and desires. An outcome of this type of thinking is to expect that others will change if we just pressure or encourage them enough.

If I just nag my adult son enough, we may think, he will stop wearing un-ironed clothes. Or

Instead of focusing on our own circle of control, we focus our energies on ‘encouraging’ others around us to change. Of course, it seems that the more enthusiastic we get about our agenda for others to change, the more they seem to resist our good advice!!

Now we do need to mention a huge caveat here: let’s be honest. The behaviour of...