[HN Gopher] Cognitive distortions that undermine clear thinking
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Cognitive distortions that undermine clear thinking
Author : sherilm
Score : 89 points
Date : 2023-12-15 15:22 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.leadingsapiens.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.leadingsapiens.com)
| brookside wrote:
| "Your emotions result entirely from the way you look at things."
|
| I wholly disagree with this foundational principle of CBT.
| Feelings of, say, anxiety or depression can completely bypass
| rational thought. For me this is easily testable by having a cup
| of coffee. After that drink I will (often) feel less depressed
| and (sometimes) be more anxious. I may have thoughts that stem
| from these sensations. Just as sometimes I may have sensations
| that stem from thoughts. The system to me seems more complex than
| thoughts > emotions.
| everdrive wrote:
| Strongly agreed. Thoughts certainly can dictate emotions, but
| I've often observed that general emotions are floating around
| in my head. I can take the effort articulate these emotions
| into thoughts, and those thoughts may perhaps be negative /
| harmful. But in many, many cases it's clear the emotions
| preceded the thoughts.
| haswell wrote:
| > _I can take the effort articulate these emotions into
| thoughts, and those thoughts may perhaps be negative /
| harmful_
|
| But those thoughts are ultimately interpretations of the
| emotion, and those interpretations are built on a foundation
| of past experience and external factors. The feeling of
| anxiety and the feeling of excitement are remarkably similar,
| and "I'm anxious about this upcoming event" and "I'm excited
| about this upcoming event" are two potential interpretations
| of the same feeling.
|
| > _But in many, many cases it 's clear the emotions preceded
| the thoughts._
|
| The question is: what preceded the emotions that preceded
| those thoughts? I think that in many cases, it's hard to
| trace this all the way back. There are times when thoughts
| (e.g. incessant rumination) directly lead to the negative
| emotions, which then lead to thoughts, but now there's a
| feedback loop and it's hard to tell where it started.
|
| There's a certain kind of co-emergence that seems to happen,
| and the interpretive layer has a lot to do with how it plays
| out. And as interpretations change, so do the resulting
| chains of thoughts/emotions.
| everdrive wrote:
| I think that's a fair interpretation, however I'd strongly
| argue two points:
|
| - Sometimes, emotions precede (and at least set the stage)
| for thoughts.
|
| - The reality is not so clear cut as the CBTs state. ie,
| they say that "Thoughts [always] dictate emotions."
|
| That said, CBT is still very effective, and will yield
| improvements for most people. It's just that their core
| tenant seems to be an oversimplification.
| tech_ken wrote:
| IANAE but the way CBT was explained to was that thought,
| emotions, and actions exist in a fully connected, bidirectional
| causal graph; not that any one particular node was primary over
| the others. The intention (I thought) was to try and take the
| "thought <> emotions" edge and apply some filtering to the
| "thoughts < emotions" flow, so that the relationship was less
| reactive and didn't lead to spiraling, ie. replacing:
|
| "bad emotions -> negative thoughts -> worse emotions -> worse
| thoughts -> ..."
|
| with:
|
| "bad emotions -> reflective, moderated thoughts -> equally bad
| or slightly better emotions -> reflective, moderated thoughts
| -> ..."
| codingdave wrote:
| To be clear, that is not a foundational principle of CBT, it is
| a quote from a book. Also, this article is certainly showing
| off distortions that CBT will teach, but is trying to apply it
| in ways that are different from CBT. CBT is focused on the idea
| that people recognize their emotions easier than their
| thoughts, so when they have emotions disrupt their lives, they
| can dig deeper to find the thoughts that brought those emotions
| up, recognize unhealthy patterns, and fix it.
|
| CBT is just a tool. It works for some things. Not everything.
| enginaar wrote:
| i call and raise. what if thoughts were the rational
| representation of emotions?
| morelisp wrote:
| I raise further, emotions are significantly the non-physical
| representation of facial musculature.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facial_feedback_hypothesis
| enginaar wrote:
| I raise further, brain doesn't make the decisions
| https://www.medical-jokes.com/all-the-parts-of-the-body-
| argu...
| tgv wrote:
| Then we would only have 4 thoughts. Next.
| phkahler wrote:
| >>> "Your emotions result entirely from the way you look at
| things." >> I wholly disagree with this foundational principle
| of CBT. Feelings of, say, anxiety or depression can completely
| bypass rational thought.
|
| Why? It's a circular thing, the reason anxiety or depression
| can bypass rational thought is that they're drawing your focus
| to a particular train of thought. There are many thoughts going
| on in our heads at one time, and emotions can shift our focus
| to ones of greater emotional impact. IMHO the really strong
| emotions are often due to unresolved issues or unprocessed past
| trauma. Once you get those taken care of (no easy task), it's
| easier to choose a way to look at something that causes you the
| least distress. Sure, it may not be the ground truth but when
| it comes to interactions with humans there often isn't an
| underlying "correct" interpretation of things, so you may as
| well adopt a view that doesn't bother you and get on with your
| day.
| altruios wrote:
| The road (train of thought) is different from the pathfinding
| (emotional weight of thoughts), and an error in pathfinding
| does not indicate anything (error/traumatic/important/wrong)
| in a train of thought.
|
| This anxiety does not have to reflex reality at all (consider
| my father and his dementia). The stimuli is inconsequential
| for a rational observer, but latched onto by the anxious.
| 'Fixing/dealing' the thought causing the anxiety does nothing
| to alleviate his anxiety - as there will always be something
| to be anxious about.
|
| It's not that trains of thoughts are causing his anxiety: it
| is very clearly his anxiety searching the tracks until it can
| get on the most disturbing it can find...
| haswell wrote:
| I've been around the block with CBT and some other forms of
| therapy. My anxiety/depression is rooted in complex PTSD from
| complex childhood trauma, and over the many years I've gotten
| very intimate with the relationship between thought/emotion and
| their interplay.
|
| One of the biggest "aha" moments for me was the day that I
| realized that other people around me interpreted certain events
| in a way that was entirely unlike my own thought process. There
| were pessimistic defaults hammered into me from a young age,
| and my interpretation of circumstances always happened through
| that lens. I knew that everyone had their own experience of
| things, but it didn't really dawn on me how drastically
| different those experiences can be, and how much they're
| colored by past experience.
|
| > _Feelings of, say, anxiety or depression can completely
| bypass rational thought._
|
| I think this is a matter of framing. I'd say that feelings of
| anxiety and depression co-exist with rational thought, but
| often surface as stronger signals. They're brain processes that
| manifest in the same space of conscious awareness as siblings
| to each other. They also seem to interact and modulate each
| other.
|
| Now that I have tools to reframe/manage my depressive episodes,
| I can observe my depression and anxiety while also having a
| rational conversation with myself about the experience. I can
| both feel the anxiety and understand that the anxiety is an
| echo of past experience that has no current purpose. So as much
| as the anxiety is "overriding" rational thought, it's also
| possible to override the anxiety with rational thought. It just
| takes intentional work, which is where the "it's how you look
| at things" comes into play.
|
| Very early in the process, I couldn't see past the
| anxiety/depression. Someone could point out the irrationality
| of it, and all I could conclude was "that's nice, but what
| about the depression?". At some point, it became clear that
| this was itself a kind of fallacy. A false dichotomy. The
| depression can exist alongside higher order thinking, and that
| higher order thinking modulates the depression over time. What
| I'd fallen into was a form of learned helplessness, where I had
| convinced myself that doing something wouldn't matter. The
| equivalent of drowning in 2 feet of water because I didn't
| believe that standing up would make a difference, because I
| didn't know that it _could_ make a difference.
|
| This is why external intervention can be very effective.
| Someone outside your currently compromised brain helps you
| start to reframe things and see them from another perspective.
| This jump starts new modes of thinking, and eventually builds
| the core tools to counteract the depressive thinking. At some
| point, it dawned on me that I could _choose_ other modes of
| thought.
|
| Once I realized this, I was off to the races. There was a point
| when I realized that my experience of a thing was modulated by
| my own brain, and to whatever degree I could get involved in
| that process, I could change my experience of things. This
| isn't to say it's easy or automatic - it has been anything but
| that - but it has also transformed my life.
| meowkit wrote:
| My understanding is that sensory inputs are going to literally
| physically reach your amygdala faster than your prefrontal
| cortex. Milliseconds, but what happens is you do have feelings
| of anxiety/depression/etc as a reaction before your
| conciousness is able to contextual the feelings.
|
| Part of CBT is recognizing that so you can try to train
| yourself not to experience emotions as deeply and/or to be able
| to clamp down on these reactions before they spiral.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I think a useful way to look at this is in a less immediate
| sense, and more long term. How you choose to interpret your
| experiences will shape your emotional stats more and more over
| time. If you decide something is bad, you ruminate over it, you
| express sadness about it to others, etc. then eventually your
| emotional response to it happening will be more and more
| negative. Most likely at least.
|
| By applying some form of mindfulness like CBT, you can avoid
| these cognitive distortions that are likely to lead you down
| unnecessarily negative thought paths. These patterns typically
| compromise us. They are more likely to lead us to negative
| thoughts about our experiences. By avoiding them, over time we
| may find ourselves feeling better as a result.
|
| I don't believe in free will in a very immediate sense. It
| seems our greatest form of control is in choosing how we react
| internally to what occurs in the world, or what "bubbles up".
| By choosing wisely we can gradually steer the ship in better
| directions. Yet we never seem to have full control over it, by
| any means.
|
| Sometimes I feel like a passenger rather than a driver, and I'm
| constantly telling the driver how to operate the vehicle. Over
| time, the driver will hopefully become a bit more
| conscientious, skilled, and capable of avoiding accidents. In
| the immediate sense, I just have to relax and be prepared for
| fender benders and other nonsense and deal with it when it
| happens.
| TomaszZielinski wrote:
| This is not the foundational principle in CBT. The closest I
| can think of is the cognitive triangle, where Thoughts,
| Behaviors and Feelings affect each other:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy
|
| For instance, anxiety therapy requires both the cognitive part
| where you work on your thought and the behavioral part,
| exposure, where you physically expose yourself to your fears
| (assuming it's something in the real world).
|
| As for depression and anxiety levels changing through caffeine
| intake, it's in the same ballpark as alcohol--you affect your
| internal chemistry, so different processes start to work
| differently, and so a given train of thought can be temporarily
| boosted or silenced. But because you still have the same core
| beliefs, as soon as you return to your baseline, you'll get
| back to the same psychical state as before.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Facts without evidence about cognition?
|
| Cognitive dissonance.
| apienx wrote:
| Practicing rationality literally improves the quality of our
| thoughts. It's a worthy dare I say noble?) goal.
|
| "Most people would rather die than think and many of them do!" -
| Bertrand Russell
| yedava wrote:
| The most important cognitive distortion to be aware of is that
| being aware of cognitive distortions will make you more rational.
| No matter how hard you practice rationality, you will exhibit
| these distortions at some point or the other. Various rationality
| movements over the years (the most popular recent one being new
| atheism) stand as evidence of this.
| barrysteve wrote:
| I love gathering the concepts listed in these kinds of articles.
|
| The structure or grand narrative to organize these concepts into
| a coherent whole is always missing though.
|
| Not sure about it.
|
| We build more sophisticated programming architectures than pop
| psychology presents to us in these articles.
| phkahler wrote:
| It is up to you to build your own grand narrative. People can
| give you the pieces, but you have to build it yourself. You'll
| understand why once you're well underway.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Various cognitive biases obstruct rational thinking when
| allocating one's investments, such as the sunk-loss fallacy. It's
| a difficult thing to fight, even when you're well aware of those
| biases.
|
| What I do is think "what would I do if this was all Monopoly
| money, and I'm just playing Monopoly with it?" I usually discover
| I would allocate things very differently.
|
| I'm still not able to overcome my biases when dealing with actual
| money, but I can move in that direction. It helps.
| ctrlaltdylan wrote:
| All of these distortions as well as a practical exercise identify
| and help correct them are available in this book called "Feeling
| Good" that I think was published in the 80's or 90's.
|
| I've seen them recycled targeting different audiences but the
| same core principles are used. I just recommend "Feeling Good"
| because it's on Libby / Amazon < $5.
|
| I started keeping a weekly spreadsheet tracking my BURNS score
| and made an effort to regularly write down when I have a bad
| thought and put it on trial to see if it fits any of these
| distortions.
|
| That paired with exercise alone has made a big difference in my
| mood.
|
| But that's just all anecdotal.
| motohagiography wrote:
| I would like to add one: "You are unsuccessful because of your
| cognitive distortions." As tools, I think these apply more to
| group dynamics than individual psychology.
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| Not really in the same vein, but I have noticed the following
| logical fallacy is extremely common.
|
| On average, X is more likely than Y, therefore in any specific
| case, X is more likely than Y.
|
| This is not true at all, and leads to some really dumb
| conclusions. Not a perfect example but : gun owners in the USA on
| average are more likely to hurt themselves with their firearm
| than successfully use the firearm on an intruder. Now, if you
| follow proper firearm practices, then your chance of hurting
| yourself is basically 0. This average number includes the vast
| swathe of people who really have no business owning a firearm. If
| you are educated and take it seriously, though, you won't hurt
| yourself. And yet this statistic has really stuck with people and
| I hear people use it all the time to assert that anyone that owns
| a gun is putting their own life at risk, regardless of how they
| treat the gun.
| tunesmith wrote:
| That's generally the racial profiling fallacy, too. Applying
| demographic probabilities to the individual.
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| yeah absolutely. If there is not a term for that phenomenon
| more broadly there should be. Its basically just a
| fundamental misunderstanding of statistics that even people
| educated in statistics seem to fall for
| techdmn wrote:
| I think it makes sense to want a study that controls for gun
| training and intelligence, I don't think it makes sense to
| reject data based conclusions due to anecdotal disagreement. My
| understanding is that a lot of those self-inflicted wounds are
| suicide attempts, which one would not expect to be influenced
| by firearm proficiency (except perhaps in success rate).
| alexpetralia wrote:
| I think this is basically Simpson's Paradox.
|
| If you take an average across the entire population, that is
| actually the average if you were to randomly select an
| individual from the population (i.e. the long-run value after
| repeated sampling).
|
| However, if you were to examine particular subgroups, they may
| wildly deviate from the average, and so in any particular
| subgroup, the mean is not at all like the population average.
|
| If you have more information on the particular subgroup you are
| sampling from, then you should of course use that information
| to estimate the relevant average. If you don't, or the claim
| you're making spans many comparable subgroups, then perhaps a
| broader average applies.
| lucas_membrane wrote:
| I saw a report recently that said that a population study
| (from some country in Europe, IIRC) showed that people who
| are still getting their COVID vaccinations updated are
| subsequently having worse COVID experience than others.
| Unfortunately, there are three possible explanations for this
| that immediately come to mind: (1) The vaccine increases
| risk; (2) People have some way of inferring their need for
| vaccine, which the study could not or did not take into its
| analysis, and the vaccinated group was a self-selected high
| risk group; (3) The vaccinated group felt protected enough by
| the vaccine to eschew isolation and make itself a high risk
| group. Note that 2 of these work in one direction an 1 in the
| other, and that all three might simultaneously be true enough
| of some subset of the studied population to be significant in
| determining the study's results. Do science, but carry
| humility, especially about why people do anything, what that
| means, and what is unknowable within your context.
| briantakita wrote:
| > On average, X is more likely than Y, therefore in any
| specific case, X is more likely than Y.
|
| I'll take this a bit further. X is more likely than Y so Y is
| not going to happen & we should not consider Y.
|
| There's a book, recommended by Bill Gates no less, "How to lie
| with statistics".
|
| From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics
|
| > Themes of the book include "Correlation does not imply
| causation" and "Using random sampling". It also shows how
| statistical graphs can be used to distort reality, for example
| by truncating the bottom of a line or bar chart, so that
| differences seem larger than they are, or by representing one-
| dimensional quantities on a pictogram by two- or three-
| dimensional objects to compare their sizes, so that the reader
| forgets that the images do not scale the same way the
| quantities do.
|
| I'll claim that statistics & even extracting quanta from qualia
| is going to have data loss from the sampling. So forecasting
| from statistics requires context on what is being forecasted.
| bhpm wrote:
| The gun example suffers from a lack of nuance in risk
| quantification. Anyone who owns a gun is putting their own life
| at risk, because "basically zero" is not "zero." So the
| statement is "If you own a gun, you are putting your life at
| risk" is technically true, it's just not very useful.
|
| The way to overcome this is to start with the average risk and
| subtract from it by naming specific mitigations that must be in
| place to reduce risk. Unfortunately, it seems that in the US,
| there isn't a voice of "responsible gun owners" in the
| conversation. There are only two voices: those who would ban
| them outright and those who would make any restriction illegal.
|
| By the way, the largest victim of gun violence in the US is gun
| owners due to suicide. It's unclear what mitigations one could
| put in place to prevent that.
| petsfed wrote:
| I believe you're committing the no-true-scotsman rhetorical
| fallacy.
|
| Proper firearm practices don't protect you from deliberate
| self-harm, nor does it protect the other people living in the
| space from a resident motivated to do them harm. Following
| proper safe firearm practices protects you and your family from
| negligent discharge and from someone turning your firearms
| against you. But it does absolutely nothing to protect you from
| yourself, nor protect your friends/family from you. You know
| who doesn't shoot their friends/family/self whilst in the grip
| of a severe, acute mental health episode? A person who doesn't
| have easy access to guns.
|
| About 42% of adults in the US live in a household with guns[0].
| If your claim is that the statistics [that show living in a
| household with guns is more dangerous than not] are easily
| mitigated via good practices, then a HUGE number of people must
| not be following those practices. Why else would the statistics
| be so clear on that point? Either a large proportion of people
| are not following those practices, in which case some other
| mitigation is necessary, or those practices are not as
| effective as you claim, in which case some other mitigation is
| necessary.
|
| I bring this up because my wife and I have discussed at length
| whether or not to conveniently locate our firearms for self-
| defense, and concluded that, for now at least, adequately
| keeping our kids safe from using the guns without supervision
| basically precludes using the firearm for self-defense (that
| old "when seconds count..." saw), to the extent that we don't
| keep our firearms in our home.
|
| 0. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/09/13/key-
| facts...
| i8comments wrote:
| The biggest distortion to clear thinking are people in power
| shutting down thought in a variety of ways, be it social,
| psychological, physical, manipulation, threats, etc.
|
| Intelligent people require power, or the approval of those in
| power, to thrive, and knowing logical fallacies in other peoples
| thinking or actions, or sometimes in your own, doesnt by itself
| give you the power to change anything and can in fact be even
| more dispiriting.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| I was talking to a guy: "I don't suffer from any cognitive biases
| because my dyslexia makes me think and learn in a way different
| than everyone else"
|
| Me: "Just the one, right?" Him: "huh?" Me: "Denial"
| RGamma wrote:
| [delayed]
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