You can usually recognize it when you use words like “Always, Never, Perfect, Terrible, Everything, Everyone, Nothing, Nobody, Worst, or Best. The Arbinger Institute calls these “Horribilizations” You take something and horriblize it.
Notice how in these situations, black and white thinking exaggerates the situation.
- A husband says to his wife: “You NEVER do the dishes! I ALWAYS have to clean up after you!”
- Depressed Young Adult: “EVERYthing is awful. The world is a TERRIBLE place. Climate change is HOPELESS. I’ll NEVER be able to succeed. I’m NO good at math”
- Someone at work: My boss is the WORST communicator.
- A young mother: “I’m just a TERRIBLE person” or “She has it ALL together, she’s such a SAINT”
- Each time, the person takes a difficult situation and makes it horrible. They use the most extreme word. Never. Always. Everything. Hopeless. Terrible.
The more extreme your thinking, the more intense your emotions will be, and the more likely you are to be depressed or anxious. But Black and White thinking also makes you helpless to escape that depression or anxiety. And it’s a lie. When you use B&W thinking, you are usually distorting nuanced reality by ignoring the good and exaggerating the bad. You’re lying.
If it’s so awful, why do we do it?
You subconsciously like black and white thinking because it serves a function in the short term. And like a drug, it makes you suffer in the long term. So what function does it serve?
- 00:00 Introduction to Emotional Reactivity
- 00:38 How to Identify Black and White Thinking
- 02:36 Why do we "like" black and white thinking?
- 05:52 How to be less emotionally reactive
- 06:15 How to reframe black and white thinking
- 07:10 How to think in the gray
- 10:15 summary of how to be less emotionally reactive
