Cognitive Distortions: Polarized Thinking

Cognitive distortions are essentially tricks that our own minds play on us to convince us of something that isn’t really factual. It’s a sick joke, but if we’re not careful, we might fall into one without realizing it.

Photo by John Fornander on Unsplash — Our brains can cause us to fall, but it can also save us from falling as well.

For example, as PsychCentral pointed out, after doing a test and failing it, you might assume that you are a terrible person in every regard.

This type of cognitive distortion makes you think in absolutes and extremes, with no middle ground in sight. This is called all-or-nothing thinking, black-and-white thinking, polarized thinking, or even dichotomous thinking.

The reality is that you are not terrible.

• You’re just someone who happened to fail a test.
• You’ve likely passed other tests in the past, across different subjects.
• Your test failure does not mean that you fail at everything else in life.

As Healthline pointed out, while most people call it black-and-white thinking, many professionals have opted to stop using this word, as some people have incorrectly assumed that it is talking about race. It is not.

For the purposes of this article, I’ll call this polarized thinking.