Supporting Mental Health: Reframing Unhelpful Thinking

Sometimes our minds play tricks on us or our students. Harvard Health says that cognitive distortions, or negative or unhelpful thinking patterns, make us feel worse, more anxious, and bad about ourselves. In order to quell these feelings of anxiety, we can equip ourselves and our students with tools.

Elizabeth Janca, experienced school administrator, former campus testing coordinator, licensed professional counselor, and Possip Reporter shares ways to address unhelpful thoughts that can increase anxiety. 

Let’s look at what cognitive distortions are and what to do about them. Then, to combat these negative thought patterns, we can learn a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy tool, Catch it, Check it, Change it. This allows us to learn how to recognize a cognitive distortion (Catch it), identify the distortion (Check it), and reframe thoughts (Change it).

What does unhelpful thinking look like?

While there are a lot of cognitive distortions, 10 are identified as the most common:

Unhelpful Thought

Explanation

Example

All or Nothing	Sometimes called “black and white” thinking – one extreme or the other	“I’m going to get a 0 or 100 on this test.”
Mental Filter	Identifying only thoughts that support what you believe	“I got a 90 on the quiz, but a 75 on the test so I don’t know the material at all.”
Jumping to Conclusions	Mind reading – assuming you know what someone else is thinking Fortune telling – assuming you know what will happen	“They’re really quiet so they must hate my idea. They are going to want to go a different direction with the project.”

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