Week Two: Seeing the Big Picture
Hopefully you read my Blog Week 1: What Are You Saying to Yourself, if not go back to start there! We are continuing our discussion on getting our thinking straight so we can stop feeling depressed, stuck and weighted down by low self esteem. In this blog we’re going to talk more about cognitive distortions—the ways we get our thinking all mucked up. Specifically in today’s post we’re going to talk about “Filtering” and how to fix it.
We do this by cognitive restructuring or more importantly you can think about it as laying down a new neural pathway that changes:
Okay, I know that sounds like a lot of hard work. The good thing is it’s not. It’s repetitive work, but your brain will take care of laying down new pathways without you as long as you repeat, repeat, repeat.
So what happens in filtering… let’s follow the yellow brick road of the hardworn evolutionary brain.
With filtering that last step of the process forces your brain to get rid of any perceptions and associations of positive elements and focuses on the negative aspects of the situation. But that’s not all it does. Because you have stored negative emotional responses and are now adding to that storage with new negative responses you have magnified the situation. You’ve just made it bigger than it needs to be.
What do we do then? Addressing ALL cognitive distortions require RECOGNITION that you are using them. In the case of filtering the big question to ask is: I’m thinking and feeling really negative right now—what positive or emotionally neutral elements am I missing? This opens the door for your brain to begin to process the even in the frontal lobes where all our higher function cognitive processes occur. That’s where you want to get ALL emotionally arousing events.
Here’s an example from my own life. I recently saw a new neurologist to get new ideas. Well, his idea was to reduce my seizure medication to see what would happen. I immediately went back to a time when I was first sick and neurologists didn’t believe I had a problem (for those new to my work, I have Systemic Lupus). So here I immediately retrieved memories that were intensely negative. I then put this doctor into their category and began to take his idea of reducing my seizure medications to mean he didn’t believe me. I filtered and magnified the situation. My response to this: dismiss the doctor and his recommendation outright without any thought to what he was saying. I filtered the entire event so that the neurologist could only be “bad”. What I ignored was the possibility that doctors had me on too much medication for the type of seizure disorder I had, which was exactly what he was trying to communicate. I only “heard” this when I went back to my original neurologist who spoke to him about his idea. And he was right.
Yet how did I get to the point where I was open to the possibility he was right. Well, for one, I sought out another opinion on the situation. I decided I might be thinking too restrictively. I may be making the wrong assumption. I owned the possibility that how I was seeing the situation might be wrong. Seeking out help from others in order to get a better idea of the situation can be very helpful in recognizing filtering. It also helps you to talk out the situation in detail so that you can start to see the positives. I was able to talk to my neurologist and articulate the benefits of possibly of being on less medication.
When we realize we filter and have to back track our behavior we have to overcome one additional obstacle. We have to admit we were wrong. That may be the hardest thing about filtering and magnifying. Often they led to behavior and assumptions that are wrong and may even be harmful to you or to your relationships. So you need to be okay with the apology in order to change your thinking.
Week 2 Challenge
Take some time and review your week. Where did you use filtering and what did you miss by using this distorted cognitive short-cut?
Filtering is when we review the events of our days and our memories and look only at the negative aspects of the events or days and fail to even notice the good. And once we’ve got the bad in our sightline, we tend to magnify it and make it bigger than it was and should be. Filtering prevents you from being able to feel good about situations and think proactively when situations require your problem-solving or resiliency skills.Before we go further let’s get something straight about the brain. Our brains are wired for short-cuts. We make quick assumptions and come up with essentially thumbnail descriptions of events. This is an evolutionary skill that allows us not to waste time deciding what situations to head towards and which ones to avoid. Our brains are also wired to focus on negative stimuli as an evolutionary survival mechanism. Both of these evolved strategies no longer work great in the complex modern era of lots and lots of situations that are both good and bad simultaneously. So we need a way to bypass these old, worn roads; these hardwired neural pathways.
We do this by cognitive restructuring or more importantly you can think about it as laying down a new neural pathway that changes:
- the direction of your perception of stimuli,
- your retrieval of memories of similar stimuli,
- the emotional response brought about by those memories, and
- the thoughts that subsequently emerge and inform your behavior and emotional response.
Okay, I know that sounds like a lot of hard work. The good thing is it’s not. It’s repetitive work, but your brain will take care of laying down new pathways without you as long as you repeat, repeat, repeat.
So what happens in filtering… let’s follow the yellow brick road of the hardworn evolutionary brain.
- First, you encounter a situation—your senses take in all the information they NOTICE and they are going to notice the negative before the positive
- Then your brain retrieves all past associations/memories of similar events and stimuli
- After that your brain retrieves all the emotional luggage linked to what we remember
- And then, voila, you have formed thoughts about the situation and you respond behaviorally and emotionally.
With filtering that last step of the process forces your brain to get rid of any perceptions and associations of positive elements and focuses on the negative aspects of the situation. But that’s not all it does. Because you have stored negative emotional responses and are now adding to that storage with new negative responses you have magnified the situation. You’ve just made it bigger than it needs to be.
What do we do then? Addressing ALL cognitive distortions require RECOGNITION that you are using them. In the case of filtering the big question to ask is: I’m thinking and feeling really negative right now—what positive or emotionally neutral elements am I missing? This opens the door for your brain to begin to process the even in the frontal lobes where all our higher function cognitive processes occur. That’s where you want to get ALL emotionally arousing events.
Here’s an example from my own life. I recently saw a new neurologist to get new ideas. Well, his idea was to reduce my seizure medication to see what would happen. I immediately went back to a time when I was first sick and neurologists didn’t believe I had a problem (for those new to my work, I have Systemic Lupus). So here I immediately retrieved memories that were intensely negative. I then put this doctor into their category and began to take his idea of reducing my seizure medications to mean he didn’t believe me. I filtered and magnified the situation. My response to this: dismiss the doctor and his recommendation outright without any thought to what he was saying. I filtered the entire event so that the neurologist could only be “bad”. What I ignored was the possibility that doctors had me on too much medication for the type of seizure disorder I had, which was exactly what he was trying to communicate. I only “heard” this when I went back to my original neurologist who spoke to him about his idea. And he was right.
Yet how did I get to the point where I was open to the possibility he was right. Well, for one, I sought out another opinion on the situation. I decided I might be thinking too restrictively. I may be making the wrong assumption. I owned the possibility that how I was seeing the situation might be wrong. Seeking out help from others in order to get a better idea of the situation can be very helpful in recognizing filtering. It also helps you to talk out the situation in detail so that you can start to see the positives. I was able to talk to my neurologist and articulate the benefits of possibly of being on less medication.
When we realize we filter and have to back track our behavior we have to overcome one additional obstacle. We have to admit we were wrong. That may be the hardest thing about filtering and magnifying. Often they led to behavior and assumptions that are wrong and may even be harmful to you or to your relationships. So you need to be okay with the apology in order to change your thinking.
Week 2 Challenge
Take some time and review your week. Where did you use filtering and what did you miss by using this distorted cognitive short-cut?
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