Cognitive Distortions
The catalog of recurring thinking errors CBT trains you to spot — catastrophizing, mind-reading, all-or-nothing thinking.
Origin
Aaron Beck (the founder of [[cognitive-behavioral-therapy]]) and his student David Burns identified them in the 1970s and 80s. Burns's Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy (1980) — over five million copies — turned the list into pop-psychology canon. The standard ten: all-or-nothing thinking, overgeneralization, mental filtering, disqualifying the positive, jumping to conclusions (mind-reading and fortune-telling), magnification/minimization, emotional reasoning, should-statements, labeling, personalization. The therapeutic move is simple: notice the distortion, name it, ask what a less distorted version of the thought would say.
Modern usage
Mainstream therapy vocabulary. The named distortions — [[catastrophizing]], 'black and white thinking,' 'mind-reading' — each have a life on social media. 'That's a cognitive distortion' is now a normal sentence in a fight with a partner.
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