In order to effectively manage your stress, it’s important to understand your own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Do they minimize or maximize your stress? Once you understand how your thoughts, feelings, and actions impact you, you’ll be able to make positive changes and manage your stress before it takes over and manages you!
Below is a list of common “mental traps”. Take a moment to check the ones that you believe apply to your stressful thinking:
Filtering: You take the negative details of a situation and magnify them focusing on them while filtering out all positive or neutral aspects.
Polarized Thinking: Things are black or white, good or bad, all or nothing. For example, you have to be perfect or you're a failure. There is no gray area or middle ground, good isn’t enough.
Overgeneralization: You come to a conclusion based on a single incident. If something bad happens at school or work, you think it will happen again and again, like failing an exam.
