Overcoming the Amygdala Part 24
How distorted is your thinking?
Perhaps you are unwittingly assisting your own anxieties by engaging in only partly conscious patterns of thought that lead you down the garden path to more and more worrying. These questions may help you to fathom your own levels of Cognitive Distortion. This is not a scientific assessment, but it might give you some idea and open your eyes to things occurring in your mind that you had previously considered ‘natural’. By totalling up the points at the end, you might get a clearer picture of how clearly you are seeing reality:
1. Do you regularly tell yourself that the very worst is happening or is going to happen?
Hardly ever 0
Sometimes 5
Often 10
2. Do you tend to overestimate difficulty or danger in any given situation?
Hardly ever 0
Sometimes 5
Often 10
3. Do you drastically underestimate your ability to cope with situations?
Hardly ever 0
Sometimes 5
Often 10
4. Are you inclined to leap to extremes of ‘black’ or ‘white’ when viewing a situation rather than seeing it as a continuum of possibilities?
Hardly ever 0
Sometimes 5
Often 10
5. Do you tend to believe that future experiences will be similar or identical to past experiences of the same general sort?
Hardly ever 0
Sometimes 5
Often 10
6. When examining a set of circumstances, do you tend to ignore things which deny your beliefs while seeing only those things which help you justify or maintain your belief system?
Hardly ever 0
Sometimes 5
Often 10
7. Do you think something must be true simply because it ‘feels’ true?
Hardly ever 0
Sometimes 5
Often 10
8. Are you inclined to load credibility and meaning onto senseless or random thoughts?
Hardly ever 0
Sometimes 5
Often 10
9. Do you tend to misinterpret bodily sensations as being exaggerated, life-threatening or dangerous?
Hardly ever 0
Sometimes 5
Often 10
10. Do you feel that worrying means that you won’t be caught off-guard by something unexpected?
Hardly ever 0
Sometimes 5
Often 10
11. Do you think that constant worrying might ward off some dreaded situation?
Hardly ever 0
Sometimes 5
Often 10
12. Do you focus on the possible ways that a situation might come to an end, because the state of uncertainty is unbearable?
Hardly ever 0
Sometimes 5
Often 10
13. Do you tend to guess or assume what others are thinking, having perhaps rehearsed conversations with them in your head, while neglecting to check whether your impressions are correct?
Hardly ever 0
Sometimes 5
Often 10
14. Do you tend to hold to a rigid perfectionism and a narrow set of values?
Hardly ever 0
Sometimes 5
Often 10
15. Do you tend to minimise positive feedback or perspective automatically, while negative outlooks are maintained?
Hardly ever 0
Sometimes 5
Often 10
16. Do you hold with a negative view of the self, the world and the future?
Hardly ever 0
Sometimes 5