Irrational Thinking Styles

IRRATIONAL THINKING STYLES

You develop a particular world-view, through the need to organize your experiences. The sort of world-view that you develop is influenced by the sorts of experiences you have. If these experiences show that there is a rational, cause-and-effect relationship for most things in the world, and that you have a degree of control over what happens to you, then your world-view will mostly fit the culture and society you live in. You stand a good chance of making success out of whatever you do, and finding fulfillment and contentment.

However, if your experiences are random or unpredictable, you may learn that you have little power over what happens to you. This influences your behavior so that it will at times seem irrational to others (and even yourself). You then stand a good chance of failing at whatever you try and feeling miserable, anxious, and discontented with your life.

The more control you perceive yourself to have, the more confident you feel and act, and the more success you will experience. Beliefs hold  your intricately constructed world-view together.  Irrational beliefs about the world can contribute to distress and unhappiness. Such Beliefs can intrude upon our thinking process, and cause us to distort our view of the world outside.

The 9 Irrational Styles

People possess particular characteristics or qualities that make them individual and unique in their physical appearance, or their manner. We come to develop particular habits in our thinking styles that also distinguish us. Even though thinking is a natural and instinctive process it does not mean we automatically do correctly. There is a lot of potential for choice in the thinking process, just as there is in the world of physical action. And you can choose to alter a thinking habit, just as you can a behavioral habit.

Thinking can be neutral, positive or negative. Another aspect of thinking is the degree to which it is conscious or automatic. An anxiety sufferer was described as having a thinking style characterized by negative, automatic thoughts based on irrational beliefs about the way that the world works.

Albert Ellis pinpointed a number of key irrational beliefs that contribute to human problems and unhappiness; subsequent research has shown that these beliefs are aided to come about and become acquired because of certain faulty thinking styles. These styles often involve illogical, unreasonable and irrational ways of thinking. They are errors that we make in our thinking, and they become part of our thinking for all sorts of reasons. These errors arise often as a result of poor logic, e.g.; selectively focusing on only some things and not on others, which colors our interpretation of what we experience.

There are nine common irrational errors in thinking. Most people tend to have a core cluster (3-5) of irrational beliefs, so they tend to have a particular limited mix of thinking errors. They tend habitually to use 3-4 types all the time, and this is where the individual style comes in to make a persons thinking style unique.

The Styles are:

Black and White Thinking

Catastrophizing

Emotional Thinking

The Fairness Fallacy

Mind Reading

Overgeneralizing

Personalizing

Shoulds

Tunnel Vision

Until next time

Nevin