Hello everyone and welcome to therapy in a nutshell. I'm Emma McAdam, a licensed marriage and family

therapist, and this is the podcast where I condense mental health skills into bite-sized

nuggets of health. You know what's funny about our mind? It lies to us all the time. Our mind loves to convince us

that circumstances are the cause of our emotions. So for example, you may think, I'm sad because I didn't

get the job. But here's the thing. It's not the outside circumstances that make us sad or anxious.

It's how we interpret them. It's how we think about them. If I don't get the

job, I might actually be feeling sad because I'm thinking, oh, I'm such a failure. Instead of

thinking, I don't have the qualifications. Or I might be sad because I'm thinking,

this career will never work out instead of thinking, I need to change my approach in the next interview.

Or you might be sad because you're thinking, nothing good ever happens to me instead of,

I'll try again soon. When we get stuck in thought patterns that are distorted or untrue or

unhelpful, this can contribute to depression, anxiety, and other mental illness.

And distorted thinking makes us less successful in both our professional and our personal lives.

In this two-part skill, first you're going to learn about 10 common cognitive distortions.

These are ways that you think that make you feel anxious or depressed.

Then in part two, you're going to learn what you can do about these cognitive distortions by

changing how you think, so you can change how you feel. Cognitive distortions are ways that our

mind convinces us of something that isn't actually true, but it feels true. Your thoughts twist

reality and you start to feel like you're bad or broken or

deficient. Or you begin to see the world as dangerous or threatening or cruel. But here's the thing with

cognitive distortions. You don't realize you're doing it. You think that the way you see things is reality.

It feels true. When you think or when you talk

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