Cognitive distortions: the thinking habits that make things look worse than they are

You send a message to a friend and get no reply for six hours. By evening you are sure they are angry with you, and you are going over everything you said last week. The next morning they write back that their phone died.

In the 1960s the psychiatrist Aaron Beck noticed that his depressed patients had quick, automatic thoughts that followed the same few patterns and were often much harsher than the facts. He called these patterns cognitive distortions, and spotting them became a central task in the cognitive therapy he developed. In his 1980 book Feeling Good, the psychiatrist David Burns turned them into a list of ten that is still widely used.

Twelve habits in twelve statements

Our Cognitive Distortions Test has 12 statements, each describing one thinking habit. We wrote them ourselves based on the lists by Beck and Burns, so this is a self-reflection tool, not a validated questionnaire. For each statement you choose how often it happens to you: never, rarely, sometimes, often or nearly always.

The habits covered are catastrophising, mind reading, all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralising, personalising, "should" statements, discounting the positive, emotional reasoning, predicting failure, labelling yourself, dwelling on one negative detail, and treating one mistake as if it ruined everything. Three examples: "I imagine the worst possible outcome and treat it as the most likely one", "I judge situations by how I feel: if I feel anxious, it must be dangerous" and "I dwell on a single negative detail so much that it overshadows everything else."

Your result is one score, and the more often these habits show up, the higher it is. The test does not score each habit separately, but your own answers do that job. The statements you marked often or nearly always show where to look first.

Everyone does this sometimes

These habits are common, especially when you are tired, stressed or low. Beck's point was about frequency and grip: in depression and anxiety the thoughts come more often, feel more convincing and are rarely checked against the facts.

Cognitive distortions also differ from cognitive biases such as anchoring or confirmation bias. Biases describe how everyone's judgement bends in general, about prices, probabilities or news. Distortions are about how you interpret your own life: your mistakes, other people's reactions, your future. For the biases, read cognitive biases and the thinking traps that affect your decisions.

Questioning a thought

Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) teaches a simple routine, often done on paper as a thought record. Write down the situation, the automatic thought and how strongly you believe it. Then ask what supports the thought, what goes against it, and what you would say to a friend who had the same thought. Finally, write a more balanced version and rate your belief again.

Take the unanswered message. Evidence that the friend is angry: only the silence. Evidence against: they were friendly yesterday, and phones run out of battery. A balanced thought might be "I do not know yet why they have not replied." The aim is a more accurate thought, which is usually less dramatic than the first one.

In 2012 Stefan Hofmann and colleagues reviewed meta-analyses of CBT and found some of the strongest support for its use with anxiety disorders.

When to get help

The test describes habits of thought and is not a diagnosis. A high score is common during a stressful period. If the thoughts come with weeks of low mood, constant worry, or trouble sleeping and working, talk to a doctor or psychologist. Working through these patterns with a trained CBT therapist is one of the most studied forms of help.

To check how you have been feeling recently, the PHQ-9 depression test and the GAD-7 anxiety test are short screeners. The post on how to deal with anxiety has more practical steps.