Event:

Thought: Emotion:

Evidence for my thought Evidence against my thought

 Remember to consider the following points in your examination of
the evidence:

1 Am I ignoring any evidence that would contradict my thoughts?

2 How likely is it that I’m seeing it as worse than it really is?
3 What would I say to someone I care about if they had this thought?

Based on your examination of the evidence, would you revise your thought in
any way to better fit the evidence you came up with? If so, write it below.

A more reality-based thought is:

Common Thinking Errors in

Anxiety and Depression
By now, you may have begun to recognize recurrent errors in your thinking. While
everyone’s thoughts are somewhat unique, in the previous chapter we considered
predictable themes that show up in depression and anxiety. Let’s revisit these
themes as we consider the common thinking errors in each condition.

DEPRESSION

As we saw with Alex, depression is linked to thoughts about ourselves that are
overly negative, as Aaron Beck and colleagues described in their manual on cog-
nitive therapy for depression. We might assume we’ll fail, or that if we failed it’s
because we’re defective in some fundamental way. When things go wrong, we’ll
take it personally and may assume we’ll always mess things up.
If you deal with depression, look for signs that your thoughts about your-
self are harsher than they need to be, based on the facts. When we take a close