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Twelve thinking traps
Thinking traps are habits of thought that make things feel worse than they are. Tap one to see what it sounds like and a question that helps.
An educational aid to use with a therapist, teacher or parent. It is not a medical device and does not diagnose anything.
How the thinking traps game works
There are three parts. Use one, or move through all three in a session.
- Thinking traps. Twelve common cognitive distortions. Tap one to see what it means, what it sounds like, and a question that helps you climb out of it.
- Trap game. Eight thoughts, one at a time. Pick the trap or traps you see, check your answer, and compare it with a more balanced thought. You score a point for every trap you find.
- Catch my thought. Type a thought of your own, choose the traps it might be in, and write a more balanced one. Rate how much you believe the first thought before and after. It ends with a card to print or copy.
A cognitive distortions activity for therapy sessions
Like most CBT games, this works best as a conversation. The score is only there to keep it moving. A few ways to use it:
- Start with the list. Ask which two or three traps sound most like the client. Most people recognize a few.
- Play the game together and take turns making the case for a trap. Many thoughts fit more than one, and arguing for an answer teaches more than getting it right.
- Look at the end screen. The traps a client missed most are often the ones they fall into themselves, which makes them worth a closer look.
- Move from other people's thoughts to the client's own. Once spotting feels easy, use Catch my thought on a real thought from the week.
- For homework, send the link and ask the client to catch one thought a day and bring the cards to the next session.
- In a group, read each thought aloud, let members vote on the trap, then talk about the balanced version.
Using it over telehealth
- Open this page before the session and choose Teens and adults or Kids.
- Share your screen and press Present mode, so the thought shows in large print.
- Ask the client which traps they see, and tap them for them. Or send the link so they can play on their own device.
- For Catch my thought, type what the client says or let them type on their own device. Copy the card as text if you want it for your notes. It is never sent to us.
Thinking traps for kids
The Kids setting uses nine traps with friendly names and pictures, thoughts from school and home, and "a little, some or a lot" instead of percentages. It suits children from about 7 to 11. Older kids and teens usually prefer the full list.
| Kids name | What it does | Grown-up name |
|---|---|---|
| Light Switch | Your brain only has ON and OFF. Things are perfect or terrible, with no in-between. | All-or-nothing thinking |
| Always-Never Parrot | One thing happens, and a parrot in your head squawks that it will ALWAYS happen or NEVER change. | Overgeneralizing |
| Gray Glasses | Like wearing gray glasses: you only see the bad part and miss all the good parts. | Negative filter |
| Mind Reader | Your brain pretends it can read minds, and it is sure people think bad things about you. | Mind reading |
| Crystal Ball | Your brain looks in a pretend crystal ball and decides something bad is going to happen. | Fortune telling |
| Snowball | A tiny worry rolls downhill and grows into a giant snowball of disaster. | Catastrophizing |
| Feelings Fog | A big feeling fogs up your view, so you believe whatever the feeling says. | Emotional reasoning |
| Sticky Labels | Sticking a mean name tag on yourself or someone else because of one thing. | Labeling |
| Blame Spotlight | Shining the blame spotlight on just one person, often you, when lots of things happened. | Personalizing and blaming |
Talking about the trap as a character helps. "Your brain fell into the Snowball trap" is easier for a child to hear than "you're catastrophizing," and it makes the trap the problem, not the child.
List of cognitive distortions
Here are the twelve thinking traps in the game, with an example of each and a question that helps.
All-or-nothing thinking
Seeing things in only two boxes, perfect or a failure, with nothing in between. Also called black-and-white thinking.
Sounds like: “I missed one deadline, so I am terrible at my job.”
Ask yourself: Is there a middle ground? Where would this really fall on a scale from 0 to 100?
Overgeneralizing
Turning one event into a rule for everything, with words like always, never and everyone.
Sounds like: “I did not get the job. I never get anything I want.”
Ask yourself: Is it truly always or never? Can I think of one time it went differently?
Negative filter
Zooming in on the one bad part and letting everything good fade out. Also called mental filter.
Sounds like: “The whole evening was ruined because of one awkward comment.”
Ask yourself: What am I leaving out? What else happened that I am not counting?
Discounting the positive
Brushing off good things as luck, a fluke or no big deal.
Sounds like: “They only said it went well to be nice.”
Ask yourself: If a friend did this, would I say it counts? What would change if I let it count?
Mind reading
Feeling sure you know what someone else thinks, usually something bad about you, when they have not said it.
Sounds like: “She has not texted back. She must be annoyed with me.”
Ask yourself: How do I actually know what they think? What else might be going on for them?
Fortune telling
Being sure the future will go badly, as if you have already seen how it ends.
Sounds like: “I will freeze up and embarrass myself at the interview.”
Ask yourself: What else could happen? How often have predictions like this come true?
Catastrophizing
Jumping to the worst case and treating it as both likely and impossible to cope with.
Sounds like: “If I make a mistake in this meeting, I will lose my job and everything will fall apart.”
Ask yourself: What is most likely to happen? If the worst did happen, how would I cope?
Emotional reasoning
Treating a feeling as evidence about the facts, as if feeling scared proves there is danger.
Sounds like: “I feel like a burden, so I must be one.”
Ask yourself: What are the facts, apart from how I feel? Have my feelings ever been wrong before?
Should statements
Strict rules about how you or others should be, followed by guilt or anger when a rule is broken. Also called shoulds and musts.
Sounds like: “I should be over this by now.”
Ask yourself: Who made this rule? How would it sound as a wish instead of a must?
Labeling
Summing up a whole person, yourself or someone else, with one harsh word.
Sounds like: “I forgot her birthday. I am such a terrible friend.”
Ask yourself: Am I describing what someone did, or judging who they are? What would a fair description be?
Personalizing and blaming
Putting all of the responsibility on one person, often yourself, when many things played a part.
Sounds like: “My son is struggling at school. It is all my fault.”
Ask yourself: What else played a part? How much of this was really in my control?
Unfair comparisons
Measuring yourself against other people's best moments, or an impossible standard, and always coming up short.
Sounds like: “Everyone my age has their life together except me.”
Ask yourself: Am I comparing my inside to their outside? Is this a fair comparison?
Where the idea comes from
In the 1960s the psychiatrist Aaron Beck noticed that people with depression tended to think in patterns that were not only negative but skewed in the same few ways, and he called them cognitive distortions (Beck, 1963). Spotting and testing those patterns became a core part of cognitive therapy, now usually called cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT. The psychiatrist David Burns later made a list of them widely known in his 1980 book Feeling Good. Lists differ in length and wording. Ours is written for this page.
Everyone falls into thinking traps sometimes. They matter when they are frequent and believed, because they can feed anxiety, low mood and anger. The goal is not to think positively. It is to think fairly: notice the trap, weigh the evidence, and find a thought you can actually believe. For a full thought record, see our free CBT worksheets. To learn how CBT works as a therapy, see cognitive behavioral therapy at Crown Counseling.
Cognitive distortions worksheet and PDF
The free PDF has three pages: a one-page list of cognitive distortions with an example and a question for each, a "catch the thinking trap" worksheet with a belief rating before and after, and a kids page with the nine friendly traps and room to catch one. Print the list for an office wall or a client's notebook, and the worksheet as homework. It is free to print and share.
