Automatic Thinking and Thinking Errors

Automatic thinking is a very helpful way of making sense of everything that’s going on in the world. As we go through life we’re bombarded with information, from sounds, sights, smells, movements, and so on, from many different places.

Automatic Thinking

Imagine yourself walking down the street, or driving a car. You have to make decisions and judgments in a split second – there simply isn’t time to think carefully or deliberate about what’s happening. To greatly simplify it, we have to go through a number of stages

What is it?

Your senses work hard to pick up information all around you, and we tend to pay attention to things that are important or relevant to us – there’s just too much information for us to take notice of all of it. This probably isn’t a conscious decision – most of this is ‘automatic’.

Take a moment to stop and listen. What do you hear? You can probably hear a lot of different things that you usually don’t pay any attention to, for example, traffic, birds, machinery, your breathing, people talking, and so on.

Do I like it?

This is a critical stage. Our decision about something being good or bad, safe or unsafe, is often based on our previous experience, or something someone else told us, or even something we learned so far back, that we don’t even remember when.

Depending on our decision at this point, we make a decision that affects our behaviour.

What Shall I Do?

At each of these stages we:

• draw on our past experience,
• draw on our knowledge about the world,
• make predictions about what might happen,
• and we can make thinking mistakes.

Thinking Errors

Watch this brief video from the Guardian:

This demonstrates just how easy it is to make a thinking error, and how our background ideas can contribute to this thinking.

What are Thinking Errors?

Thinking errors are made by everyone – as we’ve already seen – they’re the result of having fast and automatic processes take care of much of the mundane and everyday decisions in life.

Thinking errors are also very common in people who have depression – and they actually have the effect of keeping depression going.