Cognitive distortions: how the mind itself increases anxiety and why it's not just "screwed up"
Anxiety is exacerbated not only by events, but also by a way of thinking that mixes its own distortions with reality and makes them seem like facts.
When a person says "I screwed up," it often sounds like they just made up a problem out of nothing. But anxiety rarely works so primitively. Its power is different: it takes real material - an uncertainty, someone's phrase, a look, a pause, a risk, a mistake - and passes it through a way of thinking that exaggerates the threat, narrows the picture and acts as if the worst-case scenario is almost a fact. This is where cognitive distortions appear.
There are many of them, but the essence is the same. The mind ceases to be an instrument of verification and becomes an instrument of internal pressure. Catastrophizing makes one immediately imagine a collapse. Reading minds convinces that others have already decided everything about you. Black and white thinking leaves no intermediate options. Personalization takes too much of the blame. All this happens so quickly that a person often does not even notice the moment of change.
Because of this, anxiety is felt not as a hypothesis, but as a truth. This is where many fall into the trap: if a thought sounds very convincing and causes a strong bodily reaction, then it is definitely realistic. But intensity of experience is not proof of accuracy. Sometimes this is just proof of how well the mind has learned to increase tension with its own habits of thought.
Noticing distortions does not mean to immediately stop worrying. But this is already a big shift. A person begins to see that his thinking is not always a neutral mirror of events. It can also dramatize, reduce, distort, defend. And as soon as it becomes visible, there is a little space between thought and reality. It is this space that is the beginning of a healthier perception.
The most valuable thing here is that working with distortions is not reduced to positive thinking. It's not about convincing yourself that everything is great. It is about a more honest vision. Maybe the situation is really complicated. But is she really as hopeless as anxiety says? Does one miss really spell doom? Is a pause in a message really proof of rejection? It is such questions that gradually return a person to a more real scale of things.
Cognitive distortions are not dangerous because they make us "irrational." They are dangerous because they very convincingly imitate rationality. And that's why working with them is not weakness and not excessive psychologizing, but a way to remove the internal magnifying glass from those threats that have long grown only because the mind looked at them too closely.
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Published:June 3, 2026