This post is part of a series about cognitive distortions I've dealt with and how changing them helps improve my mental health. Of the sixteen most common cognitive distortions (read: Cognitive Distortions: When Your Brain Lies to You to see all sixteen), I'll be writing on the handful of distortions that have been most helpful for me to tackle.
One the distortions I deal with is Fortune Telling. The PositivePsychologyProgram website defines the Jumping to Conclusions: Fortune Telling distortion as:
A sister distortion to mind reading, fortune telling refers to the tendency to make conclusions and predictions based on little to no evidence and holding them as gospel truth. One example of fortune-telling is a young, single woman predicting that she will never find love or have a committed and happy relationship based only on the fact that she has not found it yet. There is simply no way for her to know how her life will turn out, but she sees this prediction as fact rather than one of several possible outcomes.
Fortune Telling has become less of a problem for me as I've dealt with bipolar longer, however, it still happens. When I was first dealing with mental illness, especially before being diagnosed, Fortune Telling really plagued me.
When I wasn't sleeping well, I would often tell myself that poor sleep was the norm. I would come to believe that I would never sleep well, and put that on top of already feeling tired, anxious, and often depressed, and that prediction that my sleep would always be poor became overwhelming.
Now, I've improved on avoiding fortune telling by taking things as they come. I've had enough experience with bipolar to know that episodes will happen and to tell myself during those episodes that they are not permanent.
While we all engage in fortune telling to some degree, it's important to take a step back when we start predicting the future--especially in a negative way. Living in the moment and making the best of a current situation is much more helpful than projecting into the future.
Thanks for reading.
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