Black and White Thinking

Distorted thinking, or cognitive distortions, are ways of thinking that are self-sabotaging, wrong, or emotionally damaging. One of the most common cognitive distortions is black-and-white, or all-or-nothing, thinking. It's when our thoughts bounce between two extremes while ignoring the middle. I use to live in those extremes and when I started working on my anger/anxiety/depression working on black-and-white thinking was one of the first things I did. I had to learn how to balance myself (this is called emotion regulation in DBT). Pretty much everyone has black-and-white thinking. Sometimes it shows up in small ways: You try something new for the first time and you're just no good at it, you might think that you should stop immediately. You're working in the extremes of if you can't do it well, you're not going to do it at all, and you're completely ignoring the 'gray area' that says you can practice and improve. Sometimes it shows up in big ways: You make a mistake at work and decid