How to Change Negative Thinking Patterns

After a painful or traumatic event, you may feel intense fear, panic or numbness. You may also have physical reactions such as rapid heartbeat, pain and headaches. These reactions and thoughts are common. Unfortunately, these thinking patterns may lead to more negative emotions, such as depression, anger, guilt, shame and fear.

Negative thinking patterns are common in everyone, but they’re actually based on thinking mistakes or errors. Negative interpretations about your trauma reactions can worsen your distress and make you feel worse about yourself.

Learning something about these thinking patterns can make it a bit easier to avoid falling back into using them. Here is a list of negative thinking patterns. Which patterns do you recognize in yourself?

• Jumping to conclusions — Drawing conclusions when evidence is lacking or even contradictory.
• Exaggerating or minimizing the meaning of an event — Blowing things way out of proportion or shrinking their importance inappropriately.
• Catastrophizing — Focusing on the most negative things that could possibly happen.
• Disregarding — Ignoring important aspects of a situation.
• Oversimplifying — Labeling events or beliefs as good or bad, right or wrong, with little to no information on the subject.
• Overgeneralizing from a single incident — Viewing a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.
• Mind reading — Assuming that people are thinking negatively of you when there’s no evidence of this.
• Emotional reasoning — Reasoning based on an emotional reaction.

Identify Your Negative Self-Talk

When a trauma happens, it can powerfully affect your self-talk. For many survivors, self-talk becomes distressingly negative. This will make you feel worse, not better. Instead of keeping you calm and focused on your recovery, it may make you fearful, depressed or angry.

What you tell yourself about a trauma, and about your future, really matters. Your words will influence:

• Your mood.
• How you cope with challenges.
• How you deal with people around you.
• How effectively you rebuild your life.

Many trauma survivors are troubled by beliefs that they’re guilty in some way. They feel guilty about what they did or didn’t do during and after the trauma or for surviving when others did not.

To correct negative thinking, ask yourself if the statement about yourself that’s in your head is true. Is there any evidence for it, or it is just negative self-talk?

Share those feelings without dwelling on them, and move on. Positive thoughts can increase your sense of control and ability to cope.

Develop Your Personal Counter Arguments

Remember: what you’re going through is normal and it will decrease over time. If you feel your symptoms or negative self-talk are not decreasing or are drastically interfering with your daily life, speak with a mental health professional.

Last Reviewed: November 2018