15 Reasons You May Be Feeling Bad

[Clodfobble]

1. Filtering: You take the negative details and magnify them, while filtering out all positive aspects of a situation.

2. Polarized Thinking: Things are black and white, good or bad. You have to be perfect or you're a failure. There is no middle ground.

3. Overgeneralization: You come to a general conclusion based on a single incident or piece of evidence. If something bad happens once you expect it to happen over and over again.

4. Mind Reading: Without their saying so, you know what people are feeling and why they act the way they do. In particular, you are able to divine how people are feeling toward you.

5. Catastrophizing: You expect disaster; you notice or hear about a problem and start "what ifs". What if tragedy strikes? What if it happens to you?

6. Personalization: Thinking that everything people do or say is some kind of reaction to you. You also compare yourself to others, trying to determine who's smarter, better looking, etc.

7. Control Fallacies: If you feel externally controlled, you see yourself as helpless, a victim of fate. The fallacy of internal control has you responsible for the pain or happiness of everyone around you.

8. Fallacy of Fairness: You feel resentful because you think you know what's fair but other people won't agree with you.

9. Blaming: You hold other people responsible for your pain, or tack the other tack and blame yourself for every problem or incident.

10. Should: You have a list of ironclad rules about how you and other people should act. People who break the rules anger you, and you feel guilty if you violate the rules.

11. Emotional Reasoning: You believe that what you feel must be true, automatically. If you feel stupid and boring, then you must truly be stupid and boring.

12. Fallacy of Change: You expect that other people will change to suit you if you just pressure or cajole them enough. You must change people because your hope for happiness seems to depend entirely on their compliance.

13. Global Labeling: You generalize one or two qualities into a negative global judgment.

14. Being Right: You are continually on trial to prove that your opinions and actions are correct. Being wrong is unthinkable and you will go to any length to prove your rightness.

15. Heaven's Reward Fallacy: You expect all your sacrifice and self-denial to pay off, as if there were someone keeping score. You feel bitter when the reward doesn't come.

[Undertoad]

These are excellent. I bet we all do some of these to some degree. I do #1, #2, and #13, my ex was a master at #5, what do you do?

[Clodfobble]

I catastrophize on a pretty much daily basis. Any time someone is 5 minutes late, I imagine that they are probably dead in a ditch. I start mentally going through the process of what it will be like when I am notified of their death, who I will need to contact on their behalf, etc.

I am also bad about #3, overgeneralization. I write off people or experiences because I feel I don't have the energy to work past a single fault or difficulty.

[Dagney]

Thanks Clod - definitely worth thinking a lot about. Do you have a link that I could read for more info?

[Griff]

Jesus. I do so many of those.

[infinite monkey]

oh my. mind reading for sure. a lot of these for sure.

the hard part is recognizing when you're doing one of those things, and working through it. that's what i'm trying to learn to do and i can't believe how difficult it is to try to change harmful thought processes. i've already decided how horrible tomorrow will be. i'm really trying to not do that to myself...but so far i'm failing.

[footfootfoot]

Nice, Ms. Fobble. Now if I stop all 15 of those behaviors I'll cease to exist. Then what? who'll worship you from afar then?

You need to think these things through.

j/k. srsly though,

I am printing that out and putting it next to Zippy's circuit diagram.

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by Dagney

Thanks Clod - definitely worth thinking a lot about. Do you have a link that I could read for more info?

Sorry, it was just an infographic someone passed along to me, not attached to anything else. I definitely did not write it myself.

[Pico and ME]

I found that the very first step to managining how you react to your thinking is to just learn to observe it first. It takes time and continual practice...it really never ends.

This site has some helpul ideas.

[Pete Zicato]

Originally Posted by Pico and ME

I found that the very first step to managining how you react to your thinking is to just learn to observe it first. It takes time and continual practice...it really never ends.

This site has some helpul ideas.

This.

The thing that made counseling worthwhile was learning to dredge my negative thoughts from sub-conscious level to conscious. Once you actually hear what you're telling yourself, you can evaluate it for truth.

'Cause generally it's a big fat lie.

[footfootfoot]

yep. Just because you think it, doesn't make it true.

[Sundae]

Argh!
Pretty much all of them! Some passed on from Nanny to Mum and then onto me, some I just lucked into.
Still, it proves I feel 15 x worserer than everyone else so I win.

Originally Posted by Clodfobble

I catastrophize on a pretty much daily basis. Any time someone is 5 minutes late, I imagine that they are probably dead in a ditch. I start mentally going through the process of what it will be like when I am notified of their death, who I will need to contact on their behalf, etc.

Once (when I wasn't at band camp) our home hairdresser was late.
I'd taken time off work - scheduled time it's true - just to have my hair done.
Mum was furious as twenty minutes became 30, became 40, became an hour.
I was about 18 and off work for the afternoon, what's not to like?
I said, "Maybe she had a car crash or something."

She hadn't.
But she had slipped on the ice getting into her car and broken something fundamental to hairdressing - an arm or a leg or her scissors. Oh, no - she probably wouldn't have been wearing a cast if it was her scissors.

It gave me a Cassandra complex for a while.
All about the me.

[Gravdigr]

They left out number 16:

You might just be feeling bad.

[DanaC]

Yeah...but number 16 wouldn't fit in a list of 15 reasons...

They didn't claim it to be all the reasons you might feel bad.


For instance, they also left out no. 17: some twat ran into the back of your car and now it's totalled and you have to deal with insurance bastards.

And no. 18: you ran out of pot and your regular dealer is away on holiday.


They've left out quite a few :P

[ZenGum]

Before invoking 8, 9 or 10 you should first make sure that you aren't actually surrounded by pricks.