Hi everyone! So this week I want to talk to you all about
Cognitive Distortion.
Cognitive Distortion is basically where you think things are
different than they actually are.
I was watching a video that sketch
vlogger, Thomas Sanders, put out on youtube earlier this week. The basic
premise of the video was he went to audition for a role in a theater production
and forgot the words to his song. He’s feeling really negative and down about the whole situation
when two parts of his personality pop up. This is a really cool thing that
Thomas does in his videos every now an then. He will have parts of his
personality like self-confidence, optimism, logic, and anxiety be featured as
tangible characters with names. It’s definitely a different and very
entertaining way to visualize someone “talking to themself.”
In this video, which I will link at
the bottom of this post, Thomas and two parts of his personality, Anxiety, and
Logic aka Logan, have a debate. It’s very similar to something you would see on
the news or in student government, except Anxiety is a jerk and doesn’t follow
the rules during the entire debate. The debate is titled, “The 2017 Emotionally
Compromised Debate.”
Thomas, acting as the moderator,
gives four examples during the debate and lets Anxiety and Logan discuss their
opinions on the topics.
The first situation is where Thomas
is texting someone he has a crush on and after a while, they stop responding.
In his turn, Anxiety tells Thomas this is because the person hates him. Logan
replies saying that Thomas is jumping to conclusions, which is also know as Inference Observation Conclusion.
Thomas isn’t taking into account that the person has other things going on in
their life. He needs to remember that the person could be doing something,
maybe they are with someone at the moment, or even that their battery could
have died.
Next, Thomas tells the audience
that he had made a list of things to get done to be productive, but he never
finished completing the list. Anxiety tells him that that means everything he
accomplished was a waste because he couldn’t even finish everything he wanted
to do. Logan steps in to tell Thomas that he is using Mental Filtering to ignore the positives. He got quite a few things
done on his list, and while he may not have completed the whole list, he still
got a lot done and was indeed productive.
The third example Thomas gives is
something I’m sure a lot of us have done at one point. He is ordering coffee
and the barista is very charming and may have been a little flirtatious. At the
end of their conversation, the barista tells him to enjoy his coffee to which
he replies, “You too.” He is reminded here by Logan, his logical side, that he
is Magnifying the situation, or in
other words, he is taking one small bad moment and making it seem worse than it
actually was. Sure things like this are embarrassing, but it’s not as bad you
think.
Finally, Thomas brings up that he
recently made a video that underperformed compared to the majority of the
videos he creates. Thomas is Overgeneralizing,
Logan states, which is where you lets one event speak for any and all
future events. Life has its highs and low moments, but every low is followed by
a high.
After the
debate is over, Thomas uses what he learned to take the situation where he
bombed his audition and rework it in his mind so that it isn’t all-bad. He
realizes that while yes, he forgot the words at first, he was given a second
chance and did really well. And maybe he won’t get the roll, but it’s not the
end of his career.
Overall the
video was extremely well done in my opinion. I highly recommend taking 12
minutes to sit back and watch the video. It has some very good information and
is pretty funny and enjoyable to watch.
I hope you all had a great week, and for those of you who
are on spring break now, enjoy your week off!
-Megan
