Mental Toughness & Iron Will: Distorted Realities

In this article, we will be discussing the fourth chapter of seven discussing about Mental Toughness and Iron Will. It's another long read ahead, folks.

To become mentally tough, you must change the way that you view the world. Information and events come to us in a neutral state; it is only through our interpretation that these items have positive or negative connotations. How we choose to view events determines our realities and has the ability to completely undermine your resilience and will to persevere.

A cognitive distortion is a view of reality that is negative, pessimistic, and generally incorrect. It can damage your self-esteem, lower your confidence, and make you feel as if you have no control over your life.

Cognitive distortion is also a form of self-talk that is extremely damaging to people. This form of self-talk can become so ingrained and habit-forming that people don’t realize they are creating a sad version of reality and interpreting events in a completely negative manner. Cognitive distortions directly undermine our mental toughness because they make us battle a fantasy world where the odds are stacked against us. Most of us have enough trouble with reality; distorting our view of the world to be more menacing and difficult just saps our mental toughness unnecessarily.

What Are Cognitive Distortions?

Cognitive distortions are at the core of what cognitive-behavioral therapists try to teach a client to change in psychotherapy.

The first step to launching a counterattack on these negative thoughts is by noticing when you are having them. Then you must make a conscious effort to turn them off or find alternative explanations for your worries. By refuting or turning off this negative thinking over and over again, the negative thoughts will diminish over time and automatically be replaced by more rational, balanced thinking. It is only through constant vigilance that you can replace the bad habit of cognitive distortion with the good habit of positive thinking.

Many of us may notice this type of internal dialogue while at work. A nagging thought telling you you’re inferior to your colleagues based on their level of education in comparison to yours, a worry about your public speaking skills before a big meeting, or a concern that your boss prefers to give big projects to your coworkers are all examples of cognitive distortions.

Mentally tough individuals know that to perceive reality clearly and without unnecessary emotional turmoil they have to turn off the pessimistic or negative cognitive distortions. This allows for clear, logical thought and advancement in the workplace, socially, and in relationships.

Types of Cognitive Distortions

• All-or-Nothing Thinking

All-or-nothing thinking can also be called tunnel vision. This type of cognitive distortion occurs when you only focus on the good or the bad, instead of taking a balanced viewpoint on life events and situations. There is only black and white, which causes you to severely overreact either way.

All-or-nothing thinking also manifests itself through lists of ironclad rules about behavior or expectations. People who break these rules make us feel angry, and in turn, if we break a rule, we feel guilty.

To overcome the cognitive distortion of all-or-nothing thinking, you must challenge yourself to see the middle ground. You should take into account other viewpoints and strive to see different interpretations of the situation.

Push yourself to think outside of the box to come up with as many interpretations as possible. Even if they seem wacky, having more options forces you to think outside of the cognitive distortion. When everything seems bleak and negative, this realization will cause you to be a bit kinder to yourself.

• Personalizing

Personalization is the mother of guilt. In the cognitive distortion of personalizing, you feel responsible for events that cannot conceivably be your fault. While it is admirable to take responsibility for your actions, there are things that are completely out of your control: the subway schedule, other people, and a million day-to-day factors.

While engaging in personalizing, you might believe that everything others say or do is a direct personal reaction to you even when logically this doesn’t fit. Personalizing directly impacts mental toughness; you cannot focus on reaching your goals and being mentally resilient when you are hyper- focused on others.

The opposite of personalizing is externalizing. It is another important cognitive distortion to note. When caught in this trap, individuals refuse to blame themselves for anything; instead, they blame everyone and everything else. These individuals blame others for holding them back, causing them pain or sadness, and even point to others as the cause of life troubles. All of this blame is given without any recognition for the part that the individual played in his or her own troubles, pain, or sadness.

In order to escape from both of these cognitive distortions, question what part you actually played in the event and consider options in which you are not entirely to blame.

1. Were you truly the main actor in the event or did you just play a supporting role?
2. If the blame was shifted to another actor, how might the event play out?
3. Did you do the best you could?
4. What were your intentions or motives?
5. What would you change if you went back in time?
6. How much of the situation could you truly control or influence?

By going through this mental rehearsal you will be able to identify your true role in the event and the most likely person or thing that is actually at fault. More importantly, you’ll gain a balanced view of situations so you can withstand them better.

• Overgeneralization

In the trap of overgeneralization, you take one or two negative experiences and assume all future similar experiences will be negative. Overgeneralization is unrepresentative of reality because you are operating on minimal experience, information, and evidence. You are jumping to conclusions and constructing a world that doesn’t exist in reality, just in your limited exposure.

Common cues of overgeneralization are “always” and “never.” When starting a sentence or a thought with “always” or “never,” consider whether you have the experience or evidence to back up the statement. Do you have the ability to look past your current emotional feelings or the most recent event that is causing you to feel this way? The very nature of emotions is to overwhelm and cloud judgment — perhaps you are merely honoring your emotions instead of seeking a balanced view.

Overgeneralization is common in relationships and in the work environment. Often, past hurt or disappointment clouds your ability to envision a positive future.

To overcome the trap of overgeneralization, take time to question whether evidence exists showing that future events could be different. Consider just how little information you have. Has every event of this type in your life ended in exactly the same way, or are there more than a few outliers? Do all of your friends have the exact same story, or have some of them had different experiences?

Would you feel differently when you’re further removed from a situation and unemotional? Are you jumping to conclusions in a defensible way?

• Catastrophizing

When you engage in catastrophizing, you immediately jump to the worst-case scenario and lose hope because the event seems so imminent. This is when you leap into an assumption with little to no evidence. This is a thinking trap!

Mental toughness requires optimism and a belief that your actions can positively impact your future. By engaging in catastrophizing, you are limiting your ability to prepare for the future and take action to reach your goals.

Catastrophizing can cause you to become stressed and anxious. How tough can you really be if every day you appear to be facing your own personal version of the apocalypse?

As with other cognitive distortions, a degree of introspection and thinking about your thoughts is necessary. Question whether things are truly as bad as you are making them seem. Consider alternative explanations and past experiences in similar situations. What are the positive aspects of the event? In past similar situations, what did I do and how did the event turn out? How would an innocent bystander explain the situation? What am I fixating on and why?

Perhaps most importantly, what does this say about me and my insecurities?

• Magnifying and Minimizing

Magnifying is choosing to focus on negative aspects of a situation or event until they seem to be the most important part. When engaging in the cognitive distortion of magnifying, you may focus on only parts of your body, aspects of your personality, or work traits that you view as negative while overlooking all of the other traits that are positive. Even if you’ve accomplished something great, you can’t help but nitpick and see your victory in a negative light. It’s as if you are wearing glasses that only allow you to see flaws and faults, no matter how small.

Minimizing is the opposite. This cognitive distortion occurs when you minimize positive events, aspects, or traits. While engaging in minimizing, you end up with the same view as when you magnify — nothing is good enough, and you are inadequate. Take the same victory and you will downplay your accomplishments as unimportant and luck-based. You can do nothing right; it is mediocre at best.

You simply view yourself or your actions as flawed instead of taking a more realistic view. While engaging in the cognitive distortion of magnifying and minimizing, you ignore your positive attributes and fixate only on the negatives while doing the opposite for someone else. You may view your strengths in a way that makes them look inconsequential while highly praising the same strengths of a coworker or friend. Both of these cognitive distortions cause you to view things in an unbalanced, unrealistic way.

To be mentally tough, it is important to view the world realistically. By magnifying or minimizing negatives, your outlook becomes skewed and you are not able to make logical, well- considered decisions.

To overcome the trap of magnifying negativity, challenge yourself to notice your positive attributes, list your strengths, and brainstorm reasons that you are deserving of praise or respect. Is this negative aspect a small detail or a large part of the event? What are some of the positive things about me or this event?

To overcome the cognitive distortion of minimizing positivity, do the same. Understand that you are capable and impactful.

• Jumping to Conclusions

There are two categories within the cognitive distortion of jumping to conclusions: mind-reading and fortune-telling.

While engaging in mind-reading, you assume you know what someone else is thinking. It is impossible to know exactly what someone else is thinking, yet with this cognitive distortion, people make decisions based on the imagined thoughts of other people. And of course, people are always thinking the worst about you.

Fortune-telling involves predicting negative future events without evidence. When engaging in fortune-telling, you predict only negative things for the future and have no real basis for doing so. Mentally tough people understand the importance of being realistically optimistic; fortune-telling makes this impossible.

Building toughness for the future and taking steps toward reaching your goals requires the ability to think realistically and plan specifically. You cannot be realistic or make useful plans if you are basing your thoughts off of hastily made conclusions.

To stop jumping to conclusions, question whether other explanations for events are possible or whether additional options exist. How else could you view this situation? If you believe in a certain conclusion, what are the pieces of evidence to support that? What other conclusions are more likely or common?

• Emotional Reasoning

Engaging in the cognitive distortion of emotional reasoning means that you are taking your emotions as evidence. Whatever you feel right now is whatever reality you find yourself in. That’s a difficult way to live.

While engaging in this behavior, observed evidence is discarded in favor of the “truth” of your feelings about the event. Humans tend to believe that how they feel must automatically be true. If you feel stupid and boring, then you must actually be stupid and boring. This is commonly referenced by the phrase “I feel it; therefore, it must be true.”

Emotional reasoning is one of the most dangerous of the cognitive distortions because it can be so wildly different from reality and in the span of minutes can change. Is reality actually changing moment by moment? Of course not! Only your emotions are changing that quickly.

Falling into the trap of emotional reasoning is different than the previously discussed skills of controlling your emotions and regulating how you choose to express them.

Being conscious of and allowing yourself to feel your emotions is important to maintaining your mental health and growing mental toughness; however, that does not mean that you should take your emotions to heart as a true expression of reality. In fact, your emotions often have very little to do with the status quo of reality. Remember, reality is often very neutral, yet your emotions cause you to perceive reality as either positive or negative. Many psychologists believe that emotional reasoning originates from negative thoughts and should be viewed as an uncontrolled or automatic response.

To escape the trap of emotional reasoning and take control of this “automatic response,” question whether your emotional state of mind is preventing you from viewing events clearly. Just like you wouldn’t go grocery shopping when starving, you shouldn’t evaluate anything when emotional. Always take time to return to a calm state before making decisions or committing yourself to a specific course of action. Do you feel bad about yourself or the situation at hand?

Viewing a situation while emotional, or with emotional reasoning, is like watching a completely neutral scene with horror music being played over it. And then joyous music. And then the next minute, music fitting for a clown’s entrance. You won’t know what’s really happening in front of your face because the music will influence you a certain way. Finally, ensure that you are experiencing your emotions but do not assume that your feelings are directly connected to reality.

Cognitive distortions are often automatic thought patterns that arise from our own insecurities and fears. They aren’t totally unfounded, but they depart wildly from reality. They are characterized by jumping to conclusions based on assumptions and incomplete information, as well as overreactions.

A few of the most well-known and dangerous cognitive distortions are all-or-nothing thinking, personalizing, overgeneralizing, catastrophizing, magnifying and minimizing, and jumping to conclusions. An especially notable cognitive distortion that robs us of resilience is emotional reasoning. This is when reality is defined by the emotions we feel at that very moment.

By Patrick King's "Mental Toughness & Iron Will: Become Tenacious, Resilient, Psychologically Strong, and Tough as Nails"