Distortion in Thinking - Essay Example

"Distortion in Thinking" is an outstanding example of a paper on depression.
Thinking is the result of perception, experience, bias, and judgment. Our brain destroys reality to increase self-esteem by means of justifying ourselves. People tend to perceive it as being the reason for good things, unlike ill effects. At times of stress, depression, or threats; people often resort to primal thinking that is a simplistic way of thinking. (Mondimore 96)

Filtering thinking is where an individual takes relays on negativity and magnify them while filtering out all the positive possibility of the situation.  A single aspect may be picked out, and the rest of the event becomes consumed by a single detail. People tend to pick negative details out of a context and isolate them from all the good experiences surrounding them and make them larger and worse than what they are in real life.

Other people have an overgeneralization kind of thinking whereby they come to conclusion basing on a single incident or evidence. When something bad occurs once, they expect it to happen repeatedly. An individual sees a single awful event as part of a never-ending pattern of defeat. In polarized thinking, there is no middle ground; therefore, things are white or black, good or bad, and so forth. Such thinkers view themselves as total failures if their performance falls short of perfect even with a small margin. Just to mention a few distortions in thinking, many people have this kind of thinking and usually come out of the situation and people tend to think otherwise to have their perceived view of the situation they are in at that moment.

Out of personal experience, I have been a victim of minimization that involves placing a stronger emphasis on the negative and downplaying the positive ones. According to Mondimore minimization is giving proportionality greater weight to perceived failure, weakness, or threat and giving lesser weight to perceived strength or success.  Catastrophe characterizes this kind of thinking; People who think catastrophically are unable to view any other result other than the worse possibilities. (Mondimore 136)

Working at the family business I only noticed customer’s complaints and completely ignored positive feedback from other customers. This came into contention when other workers in the premise gave a report at the end of the week and mine was completely different. Reports from other workers were full of positive feedbacks with few complaints, but my reports were full of customer complaints and no positive feedback from them.

When in junior grade I won an award as a smart kid in school, but these did not come with joy as most people expected. I took it as mockery and thought that I was given the prize to improve on my hygiene and dressing. I perceived the whole event as an insult. As I grew up, I have heard that kind of perception and thinking of events and things surrounding my life.

In conclusion, thinking involves inner thought and is influenced by physical occurrences in daily events.  After each event, there is an opportunity to evolve in the manner we perceive different situations. The way of thinking is largely based on experiences and as one grows older so does the wit.