Psychologist GiuliaSuro believes that a large part of anxiety comes from people’s “distorted cognition.”
In simple terms, it refers to certain ideas unconsciously cultivated by social environment or education, which dominate our daily lives and continually create and accumulate anxiety.
“Distorted cognition is the brain’s lie, like seeing the world through a filter that always enhances our doubts or fears.”
Among them, the most common “distorted cognition” in ordinary people is the black-and-white thinking.
The so-called black-and-white thinking means adhering to absolute standards, thinking that meeting the standards is good, and not meeting them is bad.
For those caught in black-and-white thinking, failure and success are seen as opposites; even with just one failure, they feel like everything has failed; even if bad things happen only once or twice, they believe their life is miserable and that more misfortune will follow in the future.
Why do people get caught up in black-and-white thinking? How can they break free from it?
People tend to be drawn into black-and-white thinking because it’s tiring to stay in the middle ground, while the binary approach is psychologically easier to bear, so most people choose sides.
Those excessively trapped in black-and-white thinking and striving for perfection mostly grew up with the notion that “no imperfection means no value.” Their parents, in fact, focused more on giving love and approval to their children under the condition of achieving outstanding results.
Under such upbringing, if a child fails to meet the parents’ expectations or disappoints them, they receive negative evaluations from their parents – these children never received unconditional confirmation from their parents.
However, although failure and success are linguistically opposing concepts, in reality, they are not mutually exclusive.
Failure and success are continuous; they are necessary conditions for each other, just at different points.
For those who can view things from an integrated perspective and broad vision, even after experiencing failure, they do not see everything as a failure, but rather see failure as a preparation for success. Bad things happening do not represent the entirety of their life.
So, how can we overcome binary thinking?
Accept your imperfections.
Perfectionism and black-and-white binary thinking lead to unhappiness.
No matter how talented or enviable a person is, once they fall into perfectionism or binary thinking, they tend to have self-denial, leading to unhappiness. To prevent our lives from falling into misery, we must guard against the invasion of binary thinking.
Being perfect is not the best.
If a person relentlessly pursues perfection, they may be “preparing” for an unhappy future. Compared to perfection, imperfect things are more stable; only by accepting our imperfections and showing them can we receive love and approval from others.
Even when unpleasant things happen in life, we should see them as part of life’s enjoyment. Unpleasant events have their meanings; from this standpoint, striving to find hidden treasures in the unpleasant will lead to happiness.
Enjoy happiness when things go smoothly; when things don’t go smoothly, there’s a different taste. Moments when we look back with regret and struggle are when we are striving hardest for survival.
Success may bring some happiness, but it’s during painful and gloomy days that we truly understand deeper life philosophies.
The indescribable anguish, sadness, regret, and remorse are what truly shape our lives and make us human.
How happy a person is not determined by how many more good things happen to them than to others, but by how much goodness they can find in bad situations.
