Do you remember the last time you went down a rabbit hole with worry?

Tumbling down and down until it felt like all was hopeless and unfair. I do. It's a situation we all find ourselves in from time to time.

Welcome back to savvy psychologist. I'm your host Dr. Jade Wu and every week I'll help you meet life's challenges

with evidence-based research, a sympathetic ear and zero judgment. Our brains are

designed to look for problems and anticipate threats.

We can't blame them for sometimes going overboard.

But we can talk about certain mental snares and patterns that our brains can get into so we can be better prepared to get out of those

thinking traps. In part one of this two-part series, we talked about three unhelpful but all too common patterns that our thoughts can fall into.

That included black and white thinking, which is where you see things as one way or the other with no shades of gray. We also talked about jumping to

conclusions where you convince yourself that something is true despite not

having any evidence and of, the mental filter, where you only look for evidence that supports your beliefs,

knowingly or not.

You can stop struggling and find balance if you learn to catch yourself when you start forgetting about middle grounds, time traveling and mind reading, or acting like an overzealous defense lawyer.

Now today in part two, let's look at three more common

thinking traps that keep us hooked to the struggle. This is trap number four

emotional reasoning. I feel so embarrassed I must have made a fool of myself. My hands are

shaking and my stomach is a knot. I must be totally not ready for this conversation. I feel so blah about this

project it's probably not even worth pursuing. Our emotions are powerful guides. A sense of foreboding can warn us of danger, a burst of joy can reaffirm a relationship,

and sadness can tell us where our spiritual priorities lie.

But sometimes we end up reading too much into emotions,

imbuing them with more meaning than they were supposed to convey.

For example, just because you feel embarrassed doesn't mean

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