Erasing Negative Thoughts: Overgeneralization

Hey guys, it’s Aime Lynn with Flipswitch’s Erasing Negative Thoughts segment. On each edition of Erasing Negative Thoughts, we identify one way of "stinkin thinkin" and show how it’s more often than not, either completely untrue or extremely exaggerated. On this edition of Erasing Negative Thoughts, we’ll cover the thinking pattern known as Overgeneralization. This one’s a biggy. It’s not, “I messed up this one time on this project. Oh no. I mess up EVERY on EVERY project.” It’s not, “I’m not going out tonight with my friends.” It’s, “I NEVER go ANYWHERE at all.” You made a bad grade on a test? Is it because you ALWAYS fail no matter what you do? These are just few examples of overgeneralization. Overgeneralization occurs when you take one single event and infer from it a pattern of life that is almost always true, regardless of how much evidence to the contrary there is. You can usually tell when overgeneralization is going on because examples often make use of words like “always” “never” or “every”: words that extend one isolated incident to every incident that has ever happened to you. But overgeneralization is pretty easy to disprove. “My Mother never lets me do anything!” HIGHLY unlikely. I mean, she lets you go to school. She lets you take bath. Etc. Maybe not always what you want, but then again, who gets to do everything they want? You always fail? You formed a sentence to convey the meaning that you always fail. That’s a success. By definition, you’ve already disproved that you always fail on tests. Assuming that you’re talking about failing one test in 8th grade math, the fact that you were passed to 8th grade likely means you didn’t fail at least what was necessary to get that far. And on and on. It’s very rare that claims that use words like “always” or “never” are true, so why are you thinking that way? Many other distorted ways of thinking are sub-forms of overgeneralization. ' And we’ll talk about those more in the coming weeks. For now, stop ALWAYS beating up on yourself. You NEVER give yourself a break. (Hey, if you can do it, so can I!) Join us next time for another way to start Erasing Negative Thinking.