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I mean this in the nicest possible way, but you might be thinking about that wrong.

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Your brain is a remarkable thinking machine and I hold that to be true even if you enjoy lots of TV shows involving islands.

Consider just how much it gets done each day. It navigates you safely around the world, whilst keeping track of countless details, regulating your body’s many processes and more. It’s genuinely incredible (I’d get caps made, but the uni is very particular about merchandise)

But nothing in this world is perfect. Messiness is the norm (often in the best possible way). And humans are certainly messy creatures. One of the ways that shows up is in how we think.

Our brains are powerful, but they’re not flawless. There are traps our thinking can fall into. These are patterns where our judgments become biased, irrational, incorrect, or just plain unhelpful.

I first came across the term thinking traps when I trained in the Be Well Plan. In my psychology training, though, we knew them as cognitive distortions. They’re a central part of understanding therapies like CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy) and REBT (Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy), which help people find relief from difficult emotions by shining a light on the patterns of thought and thinking fueling them.

For example:

• Someone struggling with anxiety might discover a tendency to catastrophise (imagine the worst-case scenario).

• Someone feeling depressed might notice a habit of discounting positives (dismissing good feedback as meaningless).

Once we’ve located the traps we fall into most often, therapy can then focus on understanding where those traps came from, what purpose they serve, and how to challenge or change them (or at least live more peacefully alongside them).

That’s the good news: even though our brains can fall into traps, they can also find their way back out again.

 

So how many thinking traps are there?

If you’re really keen, you can explore the sprawling list of cognitive biases on Wikipedia (I really should turn that into a memory game one day). But I warn you, it might challenge the earlier idea of ‘your brain is a remarkable thinking machine’.

But here’s a softer, everyday list of 20 common “thinking traps” connected to mental health:

All-or-Nothing Trap
Seeing things in black-and-white terms: perfect success or total failure, nothing in between.

Overgeneralisation Trap
Drawing sweeping conclusions from one setback: “I failed once, so I’ll always fail.”

Mental Filter Trap
Zooming in on a single negative detail and ignoring the bigger picture.

Discounting the Positives Trap
Dismissing good things that happen: “That doesn’t count” or “They didn’t mean it.”

Jumping to Conclusions Trap
Making assumptions without evidence.

• Mind Reading: Believing you know what others think (“They must think I’m useless”).
• Fortune Telling: Predicting the future negatively (“This will never work out”).

Catastrophising Trap
Imagining the very worst-case scenario and treating it as inevitable.

Magnification and Minimisation Trap
Blowing problems out of proportion, or downplaying strengths and positives.

Emotional Reasoning Trap
Assuming feelings reflect facts: “I feel scared, so this must be dangerous.”

Should Statements Trap
Pressuring yourself or others with rigid rules: “I should never make mistakes.”

Labelling Trap
Defining yourself (or others) by one action or trait: “I’m a failure,” “They’re useless.”

Personalisation Trap
Taking excessive responsibility for things outside your control: “It’s all my fault.”

Blame Trap
Attributing all problems to others, without recognising your role.

Control Fallacies Trap

• External Control: Believing you’re helpless, completely at the mercy of fate or others.
• Internal Control: Believing you are responsible for everything and everyone.

Fallacy of Fairness Trap
Believing life should always be fair — and feeling resentful when it isn’t.

Heaven’s Reward Trap
Expecting sacrifice and effort to always be rewarded, and feeling bitter when it’s not.

Fallacy of Change Trap
Believing others must change to make you happy, pressuring them to do so.

Always Being Right Trap
Needing to be correct at all costs, seeing being wrong as unacceptable.

Global Judgement Trap
Defining yourself or others by one mistake or shortcoming, ignoring the whole picture.

Comparison Trap
Constantly measuring yourself against others, usually to your own disadvantage.

Negativity Bias Trap
Letting your brain’s natural tendency to focus on threats and problems dominate, even when things are balanced or going well.

Ok, I am pretty sure I fell into most of these last week. Notice how each of these could certainly amplify distress or struggle in a given situation.

 

Why they matter

Put simply, knowing about them could help you suffer less.

One amusing (if slightly tragic) truth about thinking traps is that they’re easier to see in others than in ourselves.

Say your friend is upset and venting, and you can spot the distortion in their story instantly. When they stop to take a breath, you can step in and try to make a correction (‘that’s not right, you are a good person’ – or something similar). Delivered well, that correction might shorten the length of time they spend upset or lower the intensity. Helping your friend see themselves or the situation more accurately might help them suffer less.

It is harder to do that for ourselves though, because it is harder to see our own thinking traps. When you are inside your own reasoning, it all looks sensible, even when it isn’t [this is at least partly the reason why we encourage people to seek out social support when distressed, because those providing the support can often help identify errors the person is making in their assessment of a situation].

But those who spend some time learning about thinking traps, monitoring their own thinking, and perhaps even getting CBT, develop a better radar for their own distorted thinking.

Here’s a useful starting point.

Thinking traps are often present in moments of high negative emotion or extended low mood, meaning if you are distressed or have been in an extended funk, there is a good chance that certain thinking traps have shown up and are partly driving it.

For example, imagine you get a poor grade on an assignment or exam. That is upsetting and most people would be upset.

But if you look closely at the upset, you might find two components.

• the first component we call ‘clean distress’ – it is upset that we’d expect most people to feel in that scenario
• the second component is called ‘dirty distress’ – it is the additional distress loaded on top, as a function of distorted thinking (e.g. “I failed this, so I’ll always fail” – Overgeneralisation).

The goal of spotting thinking traps isn’t to remove all distress (that would be impossible, and frankly not healthy). Instead, it’s about removing the excess dirty distress, the stuff caused by distorted stories that aren’t true.

 

I’m not going into therapy Gareth, so there…

Ok, that’s cool. For now, how about just one of the following?

• Check the list: Can you think of recent times you fell into one of these traps? Is that a pattern for you? Would you like to change that pattern?

• Print it out: Keep the traps visible for a week or two, and do a quick “am I in one now?” check-in if you find a negative mood sticking around.

• Do an online CBT course: There are lots of online courses (many free) where you can learn more about this therapeutic approach. I’ve handily kept a record of some of the big ones.

• Talk it through: If you notice these traps showing up more often than feels manageable, consider chatting with a counsellor. That’s not a therapy commitment – it’s just testing whether a therapeutic approach could be useful right now.

And if you want to balance things out by looking at how our thinking can go right, dive into the world of mental models. These are frameworks that help us understand the world more effectively – kinda like antidotes to thinking traps.