Mental Filtering: Why you may only notice the Negative

Therapy in a Nutshell

Therapy in a Nutshell -Emma McAdam

Mental Health, Education, Health & Fitness:mental Health, Self-improvement, Health & Fitness

4.8 • 658 Ratings

🗓️ 5 January 2021

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mental filtering is the cognitive distortion where we only see one aspect of a situation, usually the negative side of it when it comes to depression or anxiety. You focus on the negative and disregard or filter out all the positive. You pick out a single negative detail and hyperfocus on this instead of everything else going on. If you can’t see anything positive, then your thoughts are lying to you. Mental filtering makes us more anxious, but anxiety makes us mental filter more- because anxiety attunes our brain to threats, making it so that we’re more likely to notice the bad. Mental filtering makes us more depressed, when we only notice the bad, life is depressing. But when we feel crappy, when we feel depressed, we’re more likely to mental filter. Sign up for my Newsletter: https://www.therapynutshell.com Thanks BetterHelp for sponsoring the video: BetterHelp- Professional, Affordable Online Counseling starting at around $65 a week https://www.betterhelp.com/therapyina... Learn more in one of my in-depth mental-health courses: https://courses.therapyinanutshell.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=01052021 Check Out My Favorite Books for Mental Health: https://kit.co/TherapyinaNutshell/bes... Music licensed from www.Bensound.com or Artlist.io Images from Freepik.com (premium license), Pixabay, or Wikimedia commons Therapy in a Nutshell, and the information provided by Emma McAdam, is solely intended for informational and entertainment purposes and is not a substitute for advice, diagnosis, or treatment regarding medical or mental health conditions. Although Emma McAdam is a licensed marriage and family therapist, the views expressed on this site or any related content should not be taken for medical or psychiatric advice. Always consult your physician before making any decisions related to your physical or mental health. If you are in crisis please contact the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at: https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/ or 1-800-273-TALK (8255), or your local emergency services. Copyright Therapy in a Nutshell, LLC

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to therapy in a nutshell. I'm Emma McAdam, a licensed marriage and family
0:06.7	therapist, and this is the podcast where I condense mental health skills into bite-sized
0:12.4	nuggets of health.
0:17.9	Good morning, internet. Today I'm coming to you from my front yard, herb garden, which has been overtaken by my ginormous rosemary bush and some leaks that I planted like four years ago.
0:28.6	So yeah, welcome to 2020 where every video is filmed in like some random location in my yard.
0:34.6	Today we're going to be talking about mental filtering, which is why you may
0:38.4	only notice the bad things going on in your life.
0:54.1	That is not how to spell garrison. I'm going to remember this word
0:57.9	forever because it's the word that I missed in the seventh grade at spelling bee. I took second
1:03.0	place in that prestigious event, but only because I added an extra S to Garrison. Do you do that?
1:10.3	Do you hyper-focus on the one thing that went
1:12.5	wrong, that one little mistake or that one mean comment on social media instead of the hundreds
1:18.4	of things that go right or the hundreds of nice people out there who are putting positive
1:22.5	things on my YouTube comments? This is called mental filtering. It's a cognitive distortion and it can make you
1:29.1	anxious or depressed. So mental filtering is this thought distortion where we only see one aspect
1:35.3	of a situation, usually the negative side of it when it comes to anxiety or depression. So you
1:40.9	may focus on the negative and disregard or filter out all of the positive.
1:47.2	It might look like picking out a single negative detail and just hyper-focusing on this
1:52.2	instead of all the other things that are going on.
1:55.9	So mental filtering sounds like, no one is going to like me, or I can never do anything right or the world
2:02.6	is a terrible place and it's getting worse every day or for example like if you have a
2:07.0	good day at work but then the restaurant messes up your takeout then your whole day is
	...

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