Headspace Studios. Hey, what's up everybody? My name is Kear Gaines. I'm your guest host this week. Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Tuesday.

If you listen yesterday, you know that this week is all about the stigmatizing mental health conversations, especially for men.

Now, something that really plays into this is what we call cognitive distortions,

which is just a fancy way of saying irrational, biased thought patterns that negatively influence emotions and behaviors.

And these biased thought patterns can make it harder for a man to seek help.

So today we're going to talk about the bias, its effects on men, and how we can help them push through it.

So cognitive distortions are just flawed ways of thinking.

So the best way to describe cognitive distortions is to imagine that you're putting on a pair of glasses.

This isn't just any pair of glasses.

These glasses have been smeared with a little bit of Vaseline,

and they have a few drops of red dye.

Just tap right onto the lens.

Now, I think that you and I can both agree that if you smear eyeglasses with Vaseline

and you drop red food dye on them, it's going to affect the way that you see the world. That, in essence, is how a cognitive distortion works.

So cognitive distortions develop just as a byproduct of us experience in life.

Sometimes they're protective mechanisms.

It's a way of our brain keeping us safe from the world around them.

Sometimes it's the brain picking up patterns, trying to guess or predict what's going to happen

next, and the brain doesn't do a good enough job because it doesn't have enough evidence,

intel or information to make a proper assessment. So, sometimes the way we see things are a little bit

flawed. There are a couple of ways that cognitive distortions manifest on our lives, and typically we see

them with the way we interact with our thoughts and the way that we interact with other people.

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