How rude! They're never getting another gift from you! But your response is based on an ingrained belief that people "should" send thank-you cards. How dare they? You went to a lot of work to choose their presents. Let's say your grandchildren didn't send thank-you notes for their holiday gifts. You feel guilty when you've done something you "shouldn't," and angry and resentful of others who break the invisible "should." Things "should" or "shouldn't" be the way they actually are. "Should" statements: You "should' be perfect, because mistakes are unacceptable. If you've fallen short, it's because you're completely incompetent - or so the thinking goes. The all-or-nothing ANT above leaves us stuck in good or bad, success or failure, with no middle ground between the two extremes. "When people get into a negative state of mind, it's really easy to remember all the bad things someone said or did to you, and hard to remember your successes." Feeling stuck in extremes of thinking "They're extremely common, and all of them can lead to a certain amount of misery," she says. While most of us succumb to cognitive distortions like these at least occasionally, it only becomes a problem when done chronically or to extremes, says Jacqueline Samson, a psychologist at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital. The focus of decades of research and refinement, ANTs tend to strike when we're anxious or depressed. Who is affected by automatic negative thoughts? That can sap happiness unless people learn to recognize and disarm these cognitive distortions. Comprising about a dozen categories (many overlapping), thoughts like these compel people to interpret distressing situations in unbalanced ways without examining the actual evidence at hand. This all-or-nothing way of thinking is a typical example of a pattern known as automatic negative thought (ANT). You're going to end up on the street with no means of supporting yourself. You've just been laid off, and doomsday thoughts ricochet through your brain in a chaotic rush: You're an idiot who can't hold a job.
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