If you're feeling depressed or anxious, counseling can help you take your life back. Even when you can point to a clear life event that led to your current mental health difficulties, you may be experiencing prolonged suffering due to bad habits you fell into after a traumatic event. Negative thinking isn't as simple as just thinking poorly of yourself. Instead, it includes the following four thought patterns that mental health counseling can help you overcome.

Polarizing

If you find yourself reducing the world to simple concepts of good and bad, you're likely dealing with polarizing thought patterns. Also known as black and white thinking, polarization oversimplifies the complicated events you face into either positive or negative experiences. While this may not sound so bad in theory, in practice, it leaves no room for nuance or compromise. If you or anyone else does something that isn't perfect, it automatically gets filtered through a negative lens.

Catastrophizing

If you have been exceptionally stressed for a long time, you may find yourself catastrophizing your experiences. Even minor negative experiences like losing a relatively unimportant item or being slightly late to an event can become significant problems in your mind. You may find yourself ruminating over these experiences, extending your pain through your negative thoughts. 

Personalizing

While it may seem intuitive that making everything about yourself leads to an inflated ego, the opposite can also be true. Sometimes, personalizing everything you experience leads to toxic self-blame. If you find yourself worried that other people's emotions are your fault, you may be personalizing your negative experiences.

Commanding

Depression, anxiety, and executive dysfunction can make getting anything done a challenge. One of the first ways people try to deal with this issue is by commanding themselves to get up and get to work. Unfortunately, when you constantly tell yourself that you should or must do what you simply can't do, you're bound to feel like a failure. If commanding yourself to act never works, continuing to do so blocks you from finding a real solution to the underlying issues you're facing.

When negative thinking patterns begin to color the way you experience the world, it's easy to feel depressed. Mental health counseling with a professional service—such as Reset Counseling & Wellness—can help you overcome these negative thought patterns by teaching you introspection, mindfulness, and coping skills. With professional guidance during regular therapy sessions, you can make your mind a more comfortable place to be and change the way you experience the world.