There are negative kinds of thinking that have the potential of leaving you with a stagnating state of mind, unable to grasp other ideas and unable to grow or mature. These negative kinds of thinking should be avoided, especially if you are recovering from drug, alcohol, or behavioral addiction.
What you think, you become. And when it comes to recovering from addiction, how you think determines how you will behave and deal with whatever comes at you in life. Positive ways of thinking and looking at things can contribute to a more successful, more long-term recovery, while there are negative ways of thinking that can ruin your chances at a sober, healthier, fuller, and much more productive life.
Below are some negative kinds of thinking that can ruin your recovery, whether you are recovering from drug abuse or a behavioral addiction.
Kinds of thinking that can ruin your recovery:
- Personalizing. This is when you assume or believe that situations or events revolve only around you, and that other things that don’t relate to you are unimportant. For example: “This is all my fault. If I had only gotten that job, our life would have been perfect.” Or when a family member forgot to do something you asked them to do, and you take it very personally, like it’s a planned vendetta against you.
- Magnifying. From the term itself, you make little things such a big deal, even blowing them out of proportion, which will do nothing to solve the issue. For example, something doesn’t go well for you that day, and you immediately think, “This is the worst day ever!” Another example is when your friend comes late for an appointment with you and though she has a valid reason, you magnify this flaw and tell her all sorts of things about her attitude, thereby unnecessarily hurting her feelings even more.
- Awfulizing. This is when you put the worst interpretation of any event and you fail to see the logic behind why things happen the way they do. For example, you had a slipup and failed to do something so you think that you might as well give up trying altogether. The same can be said when one tries to lose weight, for example, and then fails to achieve their desired weight and therefore feels self-pity and completely gives up on the regimen. It’s like you’re already setting yourself up for failure with just one small bump in the road.
- Either/Or Thinking. This is a way of simplifying a situation, wherein if something is not one thing, then it’s the opposite. For example, when a friend forgot to greet you as you pass each other on the street, you instantly think that he has a beef with you, when in reality, he was just preoccupied with something and did not see you. Or, if your partner disagrees with you, you instantly think that he doesn’t really love or respect you. It’s like, “It’s either he agrees with me or we break up!”
- Jumping to conclusions. This happens when you make unjustified conclusions about people or things without enough evidence. This often happens when you listen to rumors and immediately believe one thing without even probing deeper if it is really true. For example, your colleague told you that she saw your partner in a restaurant with someone else. You immediately think that your partner is cheating on you. So, you get suspicious and jealous to the point of starting a fight with your partner, when in fact, your partner was in a lunch meeting with a few people.
- Over-generalizing. This kind of thinking happens when you see one trait on a person and immediately think that the rest is just like that as well. It can also happen in situations, when you only see the tip of the iceberg and think that the whole is just like that as well. For example, “My father was on drugs and did not recover even after many times of treatment, so perhaps I will end up relapsing again and again too.”
- Magical thinking. Many people are victims of this, wherein they abandon all logic in favor of something that can’t be proven anyway. For example, when something bad happens to you, even if it’s as small as you accidentally slipping on the floor, you instantly think, “This happened to me because the universe is punishing me.”
- Mind-reading. No one can be a mind reader, but you seem to believe that people think of you a certain way, when it’s not really that case. For example, you go out on the street and you see people looking at you. You instantly feel uneasy because you think that people know your story or are talking about you. You are mind-reading when you think this way, “They think I’m hopeless/awful/pitiful/bad person,” or “These people are looking at me and they’re angry at me.”
These kinds of thinking are all illogical and irrational. Keeping up with this habit or state of mind will definitely hurt your recovery, because you should focus on thinking positive things and not dwelling on issues that may potentially compromise your recovery.
These kinds of thinking will only stress you out, make you angry, uneasy, uncomfortable, and even anti-social. However, the reality is, you don’t have to think anything unless there’s real, tangible, explicit evidence that things are the way you think they are. Otherwise, you are only inviting negativity out of nothing.
Now that you know these kinds of thinking that can harm your recovery, you can better avoid them and further empower yourself to stick to happy, positive thoughts.
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