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Episode 148: What even is time? Cognitive Distortions
155 Plays3 years ago
CW: Mental Health
Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome back to another episode of the Goblin Lore Podcast! May is Mental Health Awareness Month and the plan is for all the episodes this month to relate to important topics within Mental Health. We are also participating (along with other excellent creators) in #MentalHealthMtG and attempting to raise money for MH Organizations!!
Today's episode is a little different. Hobbes is still recovering from the MH Charity Event 2 Day Streaming Extravaganza (or something). He does a brief recap of that before handing it over to Alex to discuss Cognitive Distortions/Common Mistakes in Thinking. We discussed this way back in Episode 69 about Davriel's "Entity" and May seemed like a good time to revisit, This article is used as the jumping off point for discussion and can be a resource to learn more!
Again we would like to state that Black Lives Matter (with a link to where you can offer support both monetary and not).
We also are proud to have partnered with Grinding Coffee Co a black, LGBT+ affiliated and owned, coffee business that is aimed at providing coffee to gamers. You can read more about their mission here. You can use our partner code for discounted coffee!
This episode is sponsored by Zencastr. They provide a crystal clear sound and allows for recording separate audio and video tracks for the guests and the hosts. Plus, there is a secured cloud backup, so you never lose your interviews. It is super easy to use, and there is nothing to download. My guests just click on the link, and we start recording. Click here to get 30% off your first three months with a PRO account.
On another new note we continue our partnership with The Fireside Alliance. From their main page: "An independent media network and a progressive community of progressive communities". Please check them out!
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As promised, we plan to keep these Mental Health Links available moving forward too. For general Mental Health the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) has great resources for people struggling with mental health concerns as well as their families. We also want to draw attention to this article on stigma from NAMI's site.
If you’re thinking about suicide or just need someone to talk to right now, you can get support from any of the resources below.
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255)
- Veteran's can Press 1 at anytime to be taken to the Veteran's Line
- Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741-741
- International suicide hotlines: A comprehensive resource list for people outside the US.
- IMAlive: Click Chat Now to access a live online network of volunteers through instant messaging.
- TrevorLifeline, TrevorChat, and TrevorText (LGBTQ+ crisis support): 1-866-488-7386, or text “Trevor” to 1-20
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Transcript
Welcome and Episode Introduction
00:00:31
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers and welcome to another episode of the Goblin Lore podcast. Today's episode is going to be a little bit different than kind of what we have been doing for the month of May. It still is going to be completely mental health focused.
00:00:46
Speaker
We had a plan to be doing an episode this week on stress, both the kind of the positive and negatives of stress. We're going to focus a lot on the actual benefits to stress. We do need some level of stress in our lives and that is a topic that is very important to us that we want to cover. However, and this is why it is very relevant, it did not happen this week.
Recap of Mental Health Charity Event
00:01:09
Speaker
This was mainly due to the mental health charity event that was this past weekend and that is the reason that we are not giving you a full episode today on stress. Alex and I had actually planned to record this the day after the event and as might be expected, I was exhausted. And I'm going to talk a little bit about the mental health charity event in a couple of minutes because what we have today is a split episode.
00:01:32
Speaker
I'm going to give a little bit of a rundown of the mental health charity event, what we did, and then I'm going to pass it off to Alex. And Alex recorded for you all a little bit about cognitive distortions. This is something that we did way back in our episode 69 when we talked about Davriel. Davriel kind of has a character that has this voice that follows him. Basically, it's kind of a possession and
00:01:57
Speaker
We looked at that as his internal thoughts and we talked about some introduction to thinking the cognitive model and what cognitive distortions kind of are from a basic level. Alex today is going to take a much deeper dive into that topic. Before we get to that though, I want to make sure that we do a couple of things. I want to first thank our sponsors of this cast.
00:02:22
Speaker
Zencaster in particular is what makes it possible for us to keep this show going. This episode is sponsored by Zencaster. They are recording software for podcasts that let you do video, audio, you can have up to 10 guests, and everybody records on their own end. So you don't have to worry about audio being dropped or losing it.
00:02:43
Speaker
The other important feature is at the pro level, which is where you can use the goblin lore pod code. You can actually be able to auto level your guests. It will do a post production where everybody's audio will be auto leveled. Long pauses can be removed. Background noise can be removed. All of that is available for you before you even touch your file and move it into audacity or whatever you use to kind of finish your editing.
00:03:11
Speaker
This is a feature that is incredible. And if you join now using our code, you'll get 30% off your first three months.
Sponsor Acknowledgments
00:03:20
Speaker
We also want to thank Grinding Coffee Company. So Grinding Coffee Company is a minority owned LGBT ran coffee company that basically is there for gamers. That's who they designed their whole business model around. They did a giant Kickstarter. They want to be able to partner with and sponsor gamers and people that are producing content that are really in line with their values as a company. And they have been nice enough to work with us.
00:03:48
Speaker
The reason I also want to say thank you to them is going to lead us into the charity event from this past weekend. Grinding Coffee Company donated sampler packs to us for coffee to be able to give out. This is something that they have done for multiple charity events for us. They seriously believe in the mental health kind of cause. They believe in kind of the stuff that the Goblin Lore podcast has put out and knowing that we were
00:04:14
Speaker
responsible as a cast to kind of help organize along with Seth Cross, our other kind of main person that was involved with the organization, the logistics. They really believe in kind of the mission of what the podcast is doing both within our cast part, our episodes, but also with the charitable work. And so I just want to say thank you to them.
Stream-a-thon for NAMI
00:04:38
Speaker
Now,
00:04:39
Speaker
This past weekend, we ran a two-day charity stream-a-thon extravaganza. It was 16 hours on Saturday and 16 hours on Sunday of pod after pod of EDH, where everybody talked about mental health, played EDH, did humongous giveaways, and championed the cause of NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness.
00:05:09
Speaker
They are an organization that we firmly believe in. If you look at our show notes any week, you will find links to NAMI. You will find links to their articles on stigma, because May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and the biggest thing that Alex and I talk about is wanting to be able to combat stigma. All month long, our episodes have been, we did an episode on grief. We did an episode on talking about mental health. And these were really trying to hit that idea that
00:05:39
Speaker
that people are not alone and that what people are experiencing is maybe experienced by others and they may not know that. And the one way to kind of break down some of that is to just start talking, talking directly and openly about our mental health and our mental health concerns.
00:05:56
Speaker
The goal with the charity event was to do that while also still raising money for the National Alliance on Mental Illness. The reason is NAMI is an advocacy group at both the national and the local level. Since we are using Tiltify, which is a company that allows us to run basically ongoing donations in attached to streams all day long, that money went to the national level.
00:06:26
Speaker
NAMI at a national level provides a lot of resources for family members, for people that are experiencing mental health concerns. It is psychoeducation and they are fighting at the national level to make sure that the rights of people with mental health are heard and are taken into consideration as any health concern would be. They offer groups, they offer
00:06:51
Speaker
family groups, they offer educational resources that are available through their site that kind of can provide some of that information to challenge biases, to challenge stigma, to challenge the information that is unknown. On a local level, so if we're now kind of away from our event, if we're looking at NAMI locally in your own organization within your state,
00:07:17
Speaker
If you donate money to your local chapter of NAMI, that money stays within your state. It is made for advocacy efforts and it's made for resources for people with mental health concerns in your individual area. And this is something to me that means a lot. I've done walks for NAMI Minnesota. I've been involved with them when I am able to.
00:07:39
Speaker
because I know that the advocacy efforts are going directly to the people around me that may be struggling with this idea of invisible disabilities.
Host's Reflections on Charity Event
00:07:49
Speaker
Mental health is something that is not necessarily outwardly known, and it's not necessarily something that is outwardly talked about. And we know that it can be just as disabilitating as any physical health concern.
00:08:02
Speaker
So I wanna say thank you to everybody that was involved this weekend. I'm overwhelmed. There is literally going to be a clip of me doing a final discussion of the weekend that I'm going to be putting up that mental misplay. Alan helped me, well, it was on his stream where I turned on my face cam and I told directly how important this community is to me.
00:08:29
Speaker
and how important magic has been to me maintaining my mental health and allowing me to be where I am now. I talked about the fact that moving to Minnesota was made possible because I knew that moving here, a place I had never been before, I'd already connected with people in the magic community. I already was going to come into more of a social support network, which is something that I think is the best part of our magic community. And you all came out just gangbusters this weekend.
00:08:59
Speaker
In total with matching from some charitable organizations, we raised over $15,000 for National Alliance on Mental Illness. Within just separate from matching that alone, just from magic can players directly donating to our Tiltify was over $7,000. We had set a goal of over of 3,500, which was already.
00:09:26
Speaker
a thousand dollars or more than we did last year. And we blew past that. I mean, it just kept being people that were involved behind the scenes that were talking about this, the hosts of the games. We're starting to put up prizes to kind of keep this going with these stretch goals. And all of these stretch goals just continued to be met one after another.
00:09:50
Speaker
I cannot say thank you enough to the Magic community who came out this weekend, who watched our games, who joked with us in chat, who talked about their own struggles. We were fortunate enough to have a military-only pod, something that is of personal interest to me as a psychologist within a
Community Involvement and Future Plans
00:10:09
Speaker
veteran setting.
00:10:10
Speaker
We managed to have people from, I believe, all walks of life, from backgrounds, from just kind of across the board representing the Magic community. We had games of CEDH. We had games of very casual, low-palear pre-cons.
00:10:27
Speaker
We were silly enough to run another four person Krakoff, which was something that I got to be involved with. And people know me as the goblin person. That was one of the most hilarious things I have ever done. Four players playing Krakashima means we've got over five games in in two hours. What I'm trying to say is that I just, everybody in this community means a lot to me. The community is the best and the worst part of magic.
00:10:53
Speaker
We know there are elements in our community that don't support kind of advocacy or don't think that mental health concerns are a big deal or other social issues that we as a community still wrestle with and need to struggle with. These things are important. The weekends like this weekend really show me that there are people out there that are willing to help and there are people out there that mean well and will come to bat for me.
00:11:24
Speaker
I also want to thank, in particular, the biggest thing is the panel. We did a mental health panel with myself, chain of commander, mana curves, and Robert Schuster. And I'm calling them out directly by name because they were willing to step into a position of being the first time that we have tried to run a panel as instead of a game during this.
00:11:47
Speaker
The four of us sat down and had a conversation about mental health. Chain shared a story of hope of his own journey with mental health concerns, getting therapy, medications, the good and the bad, the side effects, the brutally honest of what it is like to be in the mental health system.
00:12:08
Speaker
myself, Chase, and Robert who have all been at one point practitioners of mental health services or work directly in it. We talked about our experiences both as practitioners but also our own mental health. We talked about those. I directly noted my struggles with being somebody who has depression and anxiety and I'm shaking right now just sitting here talking after this successful event bouncing because I'm nervous. I just
00:12:38
Speaker
It means so much to me that I have friends that are willing to come out and to put themselves in a vulnerable position to be front facing to start these conversations because that's what it takes. And so I just want people to know that. Um, I'm going to pass this off to Alex in just a second, but I just had to record this intro because we want to keep these things going. These are things that are important to us from the podcast side. Alex and I have dedicated may every year.
00:13:08
Speaker
that we can to talk about these issues and to come up with new topics on this. And we're going to continue to do that and we're going to continue to fight however we can for social issues that we believe in.
Cognitive Distortions Explored
00:13:19
Speaker
We have some stuff coming, especially the month of June, where we're trying to look at how do we support those in the LGBT community. I was talking to my wife, who's an OBGYN, who literally brought up, hey, have you considered talking about reproductive rights? And these are things that I think are important, and we want to be the cast that is able to keep doing it.
00:13:39
Speaker
And I'm going to end here just because I literally am bouncing, but I just want to say thank you again to everybody that came out this week. And I want to pass you off to Alex, who took the time to step up when I was not able to record this week and still make sure that we had an episode. And just I want to thank him so much for being my partner throughout all of this. And Goblin Lore is entering its fourth year, and it's something I just I don't have words for.
00:14:08
Speaker
So with that, I will pass you over to Alex to talk some more today about cognitive distortions.
00:14:14
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers and welcome to another episode of the Goblin Lore podcast, which is a little weird for me to be doing that intro when I know, and by now you know, that is not how we're opening the show. This week was a little weird as Hobbs opened with his talk kind of about the mental health charity stream that happened this weekend, which was incredible and great results.
00:14:41
Speaker
He has a lot more to say about that, and you'll have already heard that. I don't have a lot to add, but due to that, this week's going to be a little weird for us. With all the planning going on beforehand, and then all of the work that Hobbs did over the weekend, he is just exhausted. And I've got some other stuff going on too, so we were trying to schedule things, and it just kind of didn't work to schedule a normal episode this week. So we're doing this.
00:15:07
Speaker
Um, you have whatever the intro is from him. I suppose I might as well introduce myself seeing as I'm going right into it. Anyway, I'm Alex Newman phone on Twitter at Mel underscore chronicler and my pronouns are he him. Um, and so, but today we, it's still mental health awareness month. It's still may, but we want to continue to bring you, uh, episodes about mental health and a real focus on mental health. And despite the fact that we are kind of tired and having trouble scheduling things this week, we, we wanted to do something. So.
00:15:37
Speaker
You have the sort of intro to the topic of cognitive distortions that Hobbes led with just due to the time travel and magic of podcasting. I don't know exactly what that is, but you and I have talked about the topic enough. I can kind of pick it up and run with it. I'm going to run through this list of 15. It's an article that Hobbes will have in the show notes as well. As I'm just by myself, normally we like to do these
00:16:05
Speaker
The last time we did this conversation, the last episode we did, it was a good conversation. We had Hobbs and I, and we talked through things with just me on the mic. It's a little, I can't get a conversation. It's literally just me. That's how that works. So I'm not going to go too into detail. I do want to go through all 15 that are in this list. I'll talk a little bit personally about a few examples for myself.
00:16:28
Speaker
But I do want to kind of give a quick overview of this this resource will be in the show notes Also, if you want to go a little deeper We were convinced Hobbs and I absolutely sure that we talked about cognitive distortions last year during May turns out that both of those assumptions were incorrect When I went and looked the last time we talked about this was episode 69 that was in April of 2020
00:16:55
Speaker
So we neither talked about it during May, nor talked about it last year. It has been a while. So I'm glad we're back to it. I honestly was thinking about trying to aim for it next year, thinking that we had done it last year. And this topic, like many topics, I like to say, you know, if it's worth talking about once, it's usually worth talking about multiple times, getting a refresher is good, getting a reminder is good, and new folks join.
00:17:23
Speaker
I'm going to guess that we have some listeners now that we didn't have back two years, a little over two years ago at this point. So it would be good to refresh this conversation a little bit. Unfortunately, again, with just me, there's not going to be a lot of conversation, but I can give you some ideas of what this is, some understanding and kind of go through this particular list a little bit.
00:17:44
Speaker
And then you can go, there'll be more resources including, like I said, episode 69 from April 22nd is what I have listed as our publish date. So depending on how your podcast app, whatever you use sorts things. If you can scroll it back two years, you'll find our previous episode about this topic where we talked about Davriel Cain.
00:18:05
Speaker
Davriel the Planeswalker and his kind of things with this entity that he has and some of Davriel's abilities, I'm not gonna rehash it too much right now. And we had that particular lore tie-in. This month we were hoping to have lore tie-ins for all of our episodes and I'm gonna just have to
00:18:25
Speaker
kind of kick it forward to that. You know, between the community topic that Hobbs covered with the charity event and the fact that we had a previous lore tie in that if you were interested, we did talk about in that episode, or you just look into Davriel as a character, there's resources for that too, if you're interested.
00:18:43
Speaker
So what is a cognitive distortion? And so these are thought patterns that are exaggerated by negative thinking. These are thought patterns that don't necessarily represent reality. Sometimes they filter events that are happening in a way that we are not
00:19:03
Speaker
Getting them clearly we're getting distorted. It's a distorted thinking Method method of thinking and so again, there's a lot of details in this this article I'll kind of go through I'm gonna just start with this list here. So the first one on the list is polarized thinking this is all or nothing this one for me an example that I know I have and I hear a lot I think a common example of this and
00:19:32
Speaker
All or nothing, you're black or white thinking, but it's things like trying to quit smoking, trying to lose weight. This is often where we talk about goal setting, like one of the big pitfalls or mistakes that are often made for things like New Year's resolutions, or you kind of set up with this all or nothing thinking. You're like, I'm going to quit smoking now, or I'm going to work out every week, or I'm going to do this thing every day.
00:19:59
Speaker
And then you get two days, two weeks, a month and a half, sometimes longer even. But you get part of the way into the year and just go, well, I missed it once. It's done now. I'll just start again next year or the smoking is a good example or if you're dealing with alcoholism and you're trying, you fall off the wagon one time and then you just rather than
00:20:22
Speaker
Okay, let's try again, go back and work again. It's just a whelp, it's lost. And then that could lead to relapse and cause all sorts of issues. And I think this is a good example of this polarized thinking. Mental filtering is another one I sort of is item two kind of real.
00:20:41
Speaker
alluded to it previously. So these, what they talk about here, so there's two versions of this article, there's negative mental filtering and positive mental filtering. I mean, the negative, I think pretty straightforward things of you will often, you know, you'll magnify the negative details, you'll dwell on those, you'll lose out, you'll miss out on other things. This can often happen with depression. I know when to talk about lore stuff,
00:21:11
Speaker
quite a while ago, a couple of years ago, I believe Chase was on the podcast and the three of us talked about Karn as a character. And because he's one of the few characters in the sort of the lore of magic who has very specifically in lore callouts has been depressed, has had
00:21:29
Speaker
mental health struggles that have been named as I mean, there's, I think of it as like lowercase or uppercase D depression, lowercase, maybe everyone there is a thing that so everyone can deal with where uppercase perhaps is a formal diagnosis. We don't know that Karn has had a formal diagnosis, but he has definitely dealt with serious bouts of depression.
00:21:53
Speaker
And in one of those, he was on Mirrodin after having built Mirrodin, and he surveyed the cosmos. He sent these little contraptions to go out and look at all the worlds and see all the things out here. And I can't remember the line from the story, but it was something like,
00:22:11
Speaker
all he saw was the terrible things and all he saw was the suffering and the bad stuff and so like he he is looking at the cosmos which in our non-magical cosmos there are some amazingly fantastically amazing things i'm running out of superlatives but just some really cool and incredible things just within the stellar
00:22:35
Speaker
Sphere of things just the astronomical stuff and you're looking at the you know The incredible things from pulsars and black holes and all of this this stuff that gas giants like just Jupiter looks amazing When we finally getting these wonderful pictures from from satellites that can can take higher resolution photos and send them back to earth and this is just a piece of what we're seeing and
00:22:58
Speaker
This is, Karnas in a magical universe that is going to have things that defy our understanding of physics, our understanding of the things that are possible, and despite this,
00:23:10
Speaker
all he's seeing are the negative things. And don't get me wrong, there are probably lots of negative things. We get that from the lore, lots of different worlds. You have wars, struggles, and strife, but the fact that he's only seeing those negative things is a good example of this negative mental filtering. And disqualifying the positive is part of that. And then part of that too can be things where like, disqualifying the positive in particular can be things like,
00:23:39
Speaker
you do really well at work and your supervisor you know gives you a congratulations and it's like oh it's not a big deal I just happen to be good at this thing or it's not a big deal lots of people contributed and that's probably true that people did contribute but that doesn't negate the fact that you might have done a good job and
00:23:58
Speaker
I know I do disqualifying the positive a lot myself. I tend to dissemble and not always accept those compliments and not always accept that positive thing. I kind of just brush it off.
00:24:17
Speaker
is the next one, sorry, jumping into the next one. So this is when a person focuses on a single event and makes conclusions based on a single piece of negative evidence. Their example, a student receives a bad grade, a one exam, and just assumes that they're stupid and
Labeling and 'Should' Statements Impact
00:24:34
Speaker
a failure. I mean, I think that one is a fairly straightforward thing. I'm sure
00:24:39
Speaker
As you're listening to this, you probably have an example in your mind, either a specific example or a generalized one. So I'll move on to this. The next one here is jumping to conclusions. They say there's two different types here, jumping to conclusions and both consist of jumping to conclusions and making assumptions. The first is mind reading. This is when you think you know what the other person is thinking, you assume their reasons and intentions and
00:25:08
Speaker
take that interpretation as the only valid reasoning. Don't want to go too deep into this, but I did have an example of this that happened to myself when I was living with my first roommate who was a good friend of mine. We're still very good friends, but there was a circumstance where just getting to the early getting to know each other phase of living together. I sent a text message to him. I was just a quick little message, but
00:25:36
Speaker
He, based on his own assumptions, based on his own lived experience, assumed things about the message that were absolutely not true. And he came home really upset and ready to fight. And as like within 30 seconds, I just, yeah, I understand where you're coming from. Not, you know, it's I agree with you and then realize that there isn't a fight to be had and that kind of lost his head of steam there.
00:26:05
Speaker
So then we can go to, okay, right into fortune telling. This is also part of jumping to conclusions. Let's say this is just, this is similar to mine reading and that it's purely based on your assumptions. It's when you make conclusions, predictions based on little to no evidence. Sure, we all think of examples of that. Quick and easy one they have here is just you have a date with a wonderful person, but you predict it'll go poorly.
00:26:35
Speaker
You start making assumptions about how the date will go before it has even started based on no actual evidence. Number five is catastrophizing. So this is when thoughts occur, catastrophizing thoughts occur when the magnitude is exaggerated or diminished. I mean, this, I think, and one thing I realized I'm five in and I haven't really prefaced this too much in these conversations to one thing to mention is
00:27:03
Speaker
there is definitely some overlap. Some of there are there are going to be examples that can hit multiple things. And I think this is, you know, this is one that's going to overlap with other things sometimes too. It's, it's just it's an over over exaggeration of of thought of a thought. It's taking
00:27:23
Speaker
one potentially bad or not great thing and just blowing it up. Their example, a person is meeting a date for lunch. However, the date is running late. So this person assumes the worst. It could quickly exaggerate into all sorts of things. A person got in an accident. There's stood me up. There's all sorts of potential things when if they're running a little late, there's also a lot of reasonable explanations.
00:27:52
Speaker
for why a person might be late. And just jumping to that assumption is it's a cognitive distortion. That's why we're talking about it in this conversation. So I have to say that some of those things are
00:28:05
Speaker
unrealistic or impossible sometimes the kind of distortions are unrealistic or impossible things and sometimes it's just you jump past for you know the most likely things you jump to something that's possible but much less likely and especially then you start kind of rolling downhill with it and building up this head of steam and
00:28:29
Speaker
It's like just let the data just see what happens. Minimization is kind of the opposite. It's the same thing. It's a little bit like the disqualifying the positive here where minimization would be, you know,
00:28:45
Speaker
minimizing positive experiences. Maybe you win an award, but you just sort of play it down and say others, you know, maybe they deserved it more or others contributed enough that it wasn't just me. And so I don't really deserve this recognition myself. So anything like that. Number six is personalization. So this is when you take things personally, you assume direct and personal reaction to things that have nothing to do with you.
00:29:15
Speaker
Maybe their example here is you attend a party, but your friends are all busy engaging with other people So then you feel like they have no interest in being your friend and engaging and then you feel like they're unfairly excluding you and and it just kind of again Cascades rolls downhill you start to have these feelings these thoughts And that sort of builds on itself and then you start to act on those things and then that can cause harm and that's kind of part of what we're talking about here is it's not just
00:29:43
Speaker
when thoughts are sort of out of sync with reality, it's also when that is starting to cause you to act and behave or pumps you to act and behave in ways that start to cause negative effects and things that you don't really want to have happen. Obviously, in this particular example, you are friends with people because you like spending time with them and you like these people. And so if you
00:30:09
Speaker
If this is a sort of cognitive distortion that your brain engages in, if this is a sort of thing that happens within your thought processes, and it causes you to start to act like your friends or to believe that they don't want to be friends with you or that they are intentionally excluding you.
00:30:30
Speaker
then it starts to lead into issues and that can cause actual friction, that can cause actual problems that can cascade. And so running into this example, if you run into this sort of thing and you're in this situation and you start to have those feelings, you start to have those thoughts,
00:30:47
Speaker
questioning those, taking a step back, and that's another part of recognizing and talking about these cognitive distortions, is finding ways to kind of get out of that, finding ways to diffuse that for yourself, and taking a step back, analyzing the situation, asking, do you have enough as an example for the minimization and the magnification under the previous, the catastrophizing,
00:31:11
Speaker
A lot of times that is a, it's a cognitive distortion because you don't have the magnification in particular. You may not have the information to make, to know what is happening or to know the cause of something. But then, so then jumping to a conclusion, previous one can cause you to go down the wrong path, which then leads into some issues.
00:31:36
Speaker
So go to number seven, which is blaming. This is kind of, I think there's some overlap here with personalization, almost in the inverse maybe. This is, oh, I'm misreading this. Anyway, this consists of blaming others for their problems. So different from personalization and that the person directs blame externally. So rather than blaming themselves or taking responsibility, this person plays the victim. Again, unfortunately, I think
00:32:05
Speaker
Most of us probably have an example of this, a previous coworker, a partner, a sibling, or something like that, someone who will do something. Then when the sort of internet meme of messing around and finding out, and then when they find out, then they claim that it was not their fault, that it's somebody else's fault. This person's fault for this and that.
00:32:32
Speaker
Labeling is the next one. They call this an extreme form of overgeneralization. This is when you assign judgments to yourself based on one negative occurrence or incident. I mean, this could be things often we talk about sort of fairly or unfairly. I think it is a fairly accurate thing to say that first impressions often leave a lasting impression that often.
00:32:55
Speaker
first impression of a person or a thing or a place the first time you go to this restaurant if it's, you know, hasn't been the floor hasn't been mopped in a while in the serving area or things haven't been cleaned. There's all sorts of things where the first impression can can lead to this. Now, that can be some other things too. But that's a piece of data. And taking a single piece of data
00:33:19
Speaker
and assigning judgment. And I think this is mostly about people. So maybe I'm getting a little off base here as I'm meandering with my talk. But if you are assigning judgment to yourself, and that's one thing I want to make an emphasis on this one too. It's both yourself and others. I myself, I can say quite often, this is a thing I've had to work in the last couple of years. It's sort of
00:33:44
Speaker
overlap to this a little bit. But a lot of negative self talk to myself, I will make mistakes on a thing. And then it's just, Oh, I'm so stupid. Oh, I can't, you know, I'm just I never get this right. It's things like that. Maybe in some times, it's not even that many examples. It's literally, I make one mistake on this thing. And it's just like that, I think of myself every time, I just can't do this. And then I then that negative self talk perpetuates itself. And then I can't, it becomes a reality. I believe that I can't do this thing. And it's not to say that,
00:34:14
Speaker
You know, you always can, but sometimes setting up these expectations leads to those results. And that's for yourself at least. And then others, you know, it leads to all sorts of other issues. If you set the expectation, if you have the expectation that someone can't deliver on this thing or that this person is always rude.
00:34:30
Speaker
or that this person is always selfish, you're going to start to treat them like that. And often that's going to, even if it doesn't cause them to act in that way, it will cause friction. And then that friction can kind of justify the label and it starts to perpetuate itself. This one can be really hard to sort of untangle.
00:34:49
Speaker
It's a thing that I've had to do a lot for myself is to really work to untangle this. And when I find those thoughts that can tie into this, when I find those self, those automatic thoughts that come up, that's a, that's the thing I talked about in the previous episode, the previous time we talked about this topic.
00:35:07
Speaker
I didn't realize until I went to therapy just how much thinking I would do automatically, subconsciously. I didn't process it, but just an event would happen and my brain would trigger a thought like the negative self-talk would just pop into my head. I wouldn't create that thought consciously every time it happens, but it became a pattern where I did that, that thought would come up and then it would help to reinforce itself.
00:35:36
Speaker
That particular one is one that I've worked at. Number nine, the next one is always be being right. So this is a pattern where the person always needs to be right.
00:35:47
Speaker
They internalize that their opinions are facts, and so they don't accept being wrong, and so they'll go to great lengths to demonstrate their beliefs. There are examples of two people at work have a disagreement about a technical part of the project should be executed. One person believes it should be done their way because that's how it's always been done, but the other argues based on facts that there are industry standard procedures that should be followed, and the first person completely ignores them because this is how this should be done, and they've kind of replaced
00:36:17
Speaker
the facts of why we do the things with their own opinions or their own experiences. And this, again, unfortunately, I think we probably have examples that we can think of this. I'm going to move on to the next one, which is probably the biggest one on this list that I deal with, and that is should statements. So this distortion is statements of what a person should do, must do, or even shouldn't do. And unfortunately, you didn't see me do air quotes and all those, but that's what the article does.
00:36:47
Speaker
is putting emphasis on those particular words. So these are statements that are enforced on themselves or others. And again, for me, this is mostly myself, but I will also sometimes hold other people to this. And then that creates imposing sets of expectations that are not likely to be met. It creates guilt and frustration, especially with myself, anger and resentment, weight of others. Their example is statements like I should be exercising more, create expectations that are not likely to be met.
00:37:16
Speaker
The pressure created from the should statements makes it difficult to meet the expectations. And then when failure occurs, it creates guilt and frustration, makes you less likely to make another attempt for myself. It's things I'll be honest, like this month, I knew mental health awareness month was coming up. This was a big thing that we were planning to do. We do it every year. We've talked about it. I knew that Hobbs was putting a lot of work into planning and coordinating and working with a lot of other content folks to get the
00:37:46
Speaker
charity stream going and so I felt like okay well I should that means I should step up and take care of some a lot of the other stuff and a lot of the planning for this month and we definitely I've have done some but I haven't done as much as I felt that I should and so that started to to build into some guilt and some frustration I don't have
00:38:08
Speaker
I know I've talked about in the podcast before, I'm not going to go into too many details, but recently was diagnosed with sleep apnea. I have not been getting as much sleep. I've not been getting the rest of the restful sleep lately, working through that have some positive progress there, which is great. But it means that I'm just more tired than I have been for for a while. So that has made it tougher. I don't always have the energy. And so that's where I didn't meet the expectations that I had for myself.
00:38:37
Speaker
And it's fine to have those expectations for myself. But for me in this situation, the problem was not so much that I had these expectations, but it was that then what I didn't meet them, and it was okay. Because we've worked it out. I mean, if you're listening to this, this is our third episode this month.
00:38:52
Speaker
We've posted it on time, presumably.
Control Fallacies and Blaming Others
00:38:56
Speaker
The podcast and time travel, I guess I don't know for sure. But this is the reason we're doing something quick and easy so we can try to get this up this week still without a lot of work and having to coordinate our schedules. And we have one episode left to do, which we're already planning. And I think it's going to be a good episode. So we're going to hit the goal. The end goal of four weeks, four episodes, all on mental health.
00:39:22
Speaker
Plus Hobbs, you know, with his work on the charity stream, I think we were going to do that. But there's still this feeling of guilt, this feeling of frustration and disappointment in myself because I didn't get as much work done beforehand. I didn't get as much prep and things ready to go as I wanted to. And so we had to scramble just a little bit this week to do this. And it's fine. It's fine that that happened. But this expectation that I had for myself was that we shouldn't have to scramble. I should have it all ready to go.
00:39:52
Speaker
So I'm working through that right now. I actually say a lot of it. I did talk to Hobbs beforehand and we've kind of figured out what we're doing for the rest of the month. And that helps a lot to then sort of quell that a little bit to myself and say, no, no, we are going to hit this goal. And what we've put out this month has been really good. So I moving past that, but.
00:40:13
Speaker
that is a thing that comes up and like I said this is one for myself this is probably the most common that I run into all the time all of the things that I feel I should be doing and then I shouldn't be doing and that I end up doing and that I end up not doing and it's
00:40:26
Speaker
Well, it's a thing. That's why this is all a progress. This is all a process. And we all just kind of work through what we work through, and we just try to improve things. I guess it's not a random aside. And taking tangents when I'm sitting here talking to a microphone by myself feels very unbrand. But I'll just say one of the expressions I got from my dad a long time ago that I love is he'll just say progress, not perfection. That's his thing.
00:40:53
Speaker
Um, it's, it's just a matter of trying to make progress. It's not a matter of being perfect. It's not a matter of getting it right every time, getting it perfect every time. And it's, you know, there's the, what is the perfect is the enemy of the good or things like that too, where sometimes aiming for perfection causes you to put way too much work or not be ready to send the thing out there when it is just fine and it'll do exactly what it needs to do. All sort of things that I need to tell myself a lot of the time.
00:41:20
Speaker
So hopefully by me telling y'all it's helpful for someone out there too, but I'm gonna move on to number 11 of 15 here on our list. So number 11 is emotional reasoning. Whatever emotional person's feeling during this thought distortion must be true in their mind. So then this is accepted as fact and become an all logical reasoning is blocked out. They incorrectly assume that the negative feeling brought out by their emotions is the only truth.
00:41:49
Speaker
So their example, you may be feeling lonely because at this moment you are by yourself and your friends are off doing something fun. However, from this feeling, you then assume that no one loves you or wants to be around you. Say again, potentially some overlap here with a previous one.
00:42:05
Speaker
And I hope that I'm not making too much noise with my gesticulating. Now that I'm sitting here talking by myself, for some reason my hands are doing a lot more motion than they normally do when I'm having a conversation on the podcast with someone else. So I'm hoping I just hit my mic. I hope that wasn't too loud and distracting. But anyway.
00:42:26
Speaker
So like emotional reasoning, I think that that makes a lot of sense here, that is pretty straightforward. So it is totally made this example, you know, you're feeling lonely because you're by yourself, which is something I can currently identify with, and your friends are off doing something fun. Obviously had that before too, there's times when my friends are going to do a thing that I can't go with, for whatever reason, I've worked in the morning, they don't.
00:42:49
Speaker
they get to go out and do some fun activities. Feeling lonely, perfectly normal. That is absolutely a normal feeling to have, and there's nothing wrong with having that feeling if you are experiencing that. The distortion here is that based on that feeling, you assume that no one loves you, despite any fact, despite whatever it is.
00:43:13
Speaker
your friends were just over in the three, you know, I can just think of examples years ago when I was hanging out with my first roommate and a friend of ours. And so our third friend would come over our second, I guess, depending on how you're counting. So there were three total of us. This other guy would come over and
00:43:31
Speaker
three of us would hang out, then it would be my bedtime because I had work the next day. And the two of them would leave with the apartment to go do something else, which right there says that they were being considerate of me, giving me the space so that I could go to sleep and that they wouldn't keep me awake. It's like, but despite that, you know, in this situation, I say this is something that I didn't experience too much. But in that situation,
00:43:57
Speaker
If I was feeling that no one loved me, that is literally the opposite of what just happened. They left to give me that space and we had just all were hanging out. If they truly didn't love me or want to be around me, they would have left beforehand and just left me alone.
00:44:16
Speaker
to spend the evening by myself before going to bed, but instead we all hang out, then they leave. So that's why this is a cognitive distortion. So moving on to the next, these are control fallacies. They are cognitive distortions defined by two beliefs, external and internal control fallacies. So the external is the belief that a person's life is completely controlled by external factors and fate has already been decided. So they feel they have absolutely no control over their situation.
00:44:45
Speaker
In their example here, a person cheats and lies to their partner when they leave. They feel that it was all the other person's fault for leaving. They think that they had no control over what happened, but they failed to see how their actions affected what happened to them. Again, talking about them messing around and finding out. This is a person who does something that negatively affects their partner. The partner leaves, and now it's the partner's fault for leaving despite
00:45:09
Speaker
the contributions that this person had to the situation. The internal control is the belief that the person has complete control of themselves and their surroundings. It assumes you're responsible for the pain and happiness of those around you. If someone isn't happy, they will assume it was their fault. So their example is a colleague makes a technical error on a task at work. It created severe consequences for other tasks. You feel guilty and responsible because when you reviewed their work, you missed the mistake. I'll say,
00:45:38
Speaker
this I feel myself. And to a degree, that is way too much. I feel guilty for trying to take time off at work or sometimes I have issues. This is a thing that I do have worked through, and especially I've worked with my team for a number of years now. So I feel a lot more comfortable leaving tasks for them to work. But any time that action I take at work causes other people to have to do more work,
00:46:08
Speaker
I feel guilt. I feel a little bit of guilt, and it's like, but that's the whole point of having multiple people in a team. This whole point of having coworkers cross-trained is so that we can take time off. We have to do that. It's a thing we have to do, but I still feel a little bit of guilt whenever.
00:46:23
Speaker
I ask for days off, and then particularly if someone already has the day off, because then if there's two of us off, that just increases the workload on the rest of the team. It's still something that can be done. And I myself have gladly been one of the two people who have a four-person team plus their supervisor, but I myself have gladly taken on extra work.
00:46:43
Speaker
to allow my teammates to take Tim off. Though I'll be honest, I think a lot of us have the same internal control fallacy. I had a coworker who has had issues with that and sometimes ends up with extra vacation time at the end of the year. And it's like, requires some pressure to take time off. And thankfully, like last year actually was not bad at all. They definitely took time off early and that made it easier. But
00:47:08
Speaker
It's also that I suppose is an example of too, if you have an issue like that or you're feeling guilty about taking time off and fortunately for us, we work for a company that gives us a good amount of time off. What does that give you? Then so you don't take it and you get to the end of the year and you have to take it or you lose a bunch of it, suddenly now you actually are putting more work on your team because there isn't the same amount of time to spread it out and things. Sometimes those consequences do catch up to you.
00:47:39
Speaker
Fallacy of change is the next one. This thought distortion assumes that others should change to suit their own interest. So a person will pressure others to change because they feel change will bring them happiness. And they're convinced that the happiness is dependent on the person changing. So their example, a person might pressure their partner to change a few of their manners. They believe their partner is perfect in every other way, except those few minor things and expect these changes will make them even happier.
00:48:07
Speaker
So I think this was pretty straightforward. I don't have a lot to add to this. Let's move on to the next one, because I've actually been recording a lot longer than I was expecting. Fallacy of fairness assumes all things in life should be applied and measured based on fairness and equity. However, in reality, not all things work out that way. And we feel angry and resentful towards those things in life.
00:48:31
Speaker
Again, this makes sense, I think a lot of folks. And there's, I think it's something to add to this too. And they're talking about some other stuff in their example, but obviously we know life is not fair. And that's a thing that gets mentioned a lot. Unfortunately, it sometimes gets used as a bludgeon for people who are actually trying to make real actual changes.
00:48:51
Speaker
That's a whole other topic that I don't really need to get into, but so that's one thing to look for here. But there is some idea too of fairness in situations, completely, completely arbitrary example from like 20 years ago, maybe not even that far, 15 or something at work. I don't even know how we got these. People were cleaning out an old warehouse and somewhere they had these big cardboard cutouts of,
00:49:17
Speaker
animals or mascots or something. I'm not sure what it was. I'm not even perfectly clear on the situation because I just heard about it secondhand. But somebody who was a temp in the department saw those said, Hey, do we need these? Why are these here? If we don't need them, can I just take them? And the manager was like, Yeah, we don't know why they're here. We don't need them at all.
00:49:37
Speaker
We would actually put them in the garbage. If you have a use for them, you want them, you take them. That's great. Then they're not being just thrown away. And then a different coworker responded to that, grumbled to that. They didn't speak up because this kind of the person's MO, they weren't.
00:49:56
Speaker
going to try to work out work this out and said they just wanted to kind of be grumbling and be resentful about it talking about how well it's not fair that this person got to take them all and they're only attempt so you know why did everybody gets a chance to get some and when this person could very much have spoken up and said hey I would like some could I take one or two and work that out instead they just kind of grumbled about that but it's this is a situation where it's like
00:50:20
Speaker
Also, fairness is in the eye of the beholder sometimes too, because in this situation for her it wasn't fair that someone got to take all of them, but also that person is the one who asked for it and saw them and identified this as a thing that we don't need. Could I just take them? So you didn't say anything about it. Had they not said anything about it, you wouldn't have gotten them anyway.
00:50:43
Speaker
So there's, I don't know, I hope this example kind of fits. It felt very pretty. But I'll move on to the last example that they have in this article here is the Heaven's Reward Fallacy.
Revisiting Cognitive Distortions
00:50:56
Speaker
They say it's based on the fallacy of fairness and that we live in a fair world and will be rewarded fairly. So this distortion is based on the reason that you should be rewarded based on how hard you work.
00:51:06
Speaker
similar to the fallacy of fairness, you'd be disappointed. Most things in reality aren't fair. I'm not quite sure how these differentiate too much.
00:51:14
Speaker
It makes sense. The same thing. I think there's situations where things are not going to always work out. That doesn't necessarily mean, and to be honest, that doesn't necessarily mean things are unfair either. You don't always have all the information. But again, these cognitive distortions are things that tend to lead to frustration and anger and resentment because it's you seeing this is how things should work, or this is how I think things work, or just the filters that are in your head that run information through these filters. And then that
00:51:45
Speaker
information coming out, those feelings coming out, those thoughts coming out in a way that causes resentment and anger and tends to then build towards more negative things. So that is this whole list. Like I said, I was thinking I would be much quicker with this. So hopefully that helped. Please let us, there's any feedback you have, please check out this article. There's a lot of good information in here in our previous episode. I'm sure this is a topic we will revisit. I am shocked.
00:52:15
Speaker
But this is the first time we've revisited it. Like I said, I swear that we had done at least two episodes on this. Maybe we did a second episode and I missed it in the planner, but I'm pretty sure this is the only one we did was about two years ago when I was looking through our planning documents. So this is a topic we will definitely come back to. I know this is one that Hobbs really likes to talk to. Obviously, it's a topic that I can talk about because I just spent almost in a normal episode like
00:52:42
Speaker
just talking by myself, which I thought I wouldn't do. Generally for me, the conversation with other people is what really helps me kind of get things going. Maybe it helped that I was running down a list here that gave me sort of something to build off of, but any event.
Resources and Accessibility Expansion
00:52:57
Speaker
I'm gonna wrap this up. So please, you know, check out the resources if you need. I know we've had to them in our show notes for a while, but I don't think we've called out the fact that for the last few years, every single episode, we started as a mental health awareness thing, but now every single episode, it has resources in our show notes. If you feel that you need to talk to somebody, if you're going through some things that you're struggling,
00:53:23
Speaker
Please check that there are some some websites for information. There are some Warm lines and suicide hotlines. There are there's also a list of international ones because a lot of obviously we're we're based in the US So a lot of our stuff is isn't for the United States, but we do have a list of international resources in there, too So if you are listening and you are not in the US we do have some resources I don't know that we necessarily have some that represent everywhere but
00:53:49
Speaker
there are some resources in the show now. So please make use of those. If you feel you need to, please give those to other people if they, you know, feel like they need something. Also, I want to say we were going to say this like a month ago, and then we kind of have forgotten in every single episode because it's Mental Health Awareness Month. But we got YouTube working again. So we or Hobbs got YouTube working again. So our episodes are being posted on YouTube now, as of about a month ago.
00:54:18
Speaker
So this is just audio. There's no video to it. But if you are someone who can pull up YouTube and get audio content off of YouTube easier than you can other podcasting places that is where I normally go. But we want to be available where people are using the service. Also, if there's another service, let us know. We can see if we can get on there. So we are on YouTube now.
00:54:45
Speaker
or back on YouTube. I think we had some episodes that were posting on there a while ago but there's like a two or three year cap because at one point some, I don't even know what it is so I don't know why I'm trying to explain what happened but something happened in the feed and stuff stopped getting out there but Hobbs figured it out.
00:55:01
Speaker
Got the, now all of our episodes should be posting there as they get posted everywhere else.
Future Events and Listener Engagement
00:55:08
Speaker
Unfortunately, it didn't backfill, but we have about a month worth out there. And I just want to thank everybody as I close here, just in the community, everyone who interacts with us, obviously the stuff over this weekend was just incredible. All the people who came out to support mental health awareness and who donated, even who were just present and participated in the events. I know there was
00:55:28
Speaker
a lot of Magic played. There was a panel talking to Hobbs, obviously. It's one day after, when I'm recording this, it's one day after the event. So nothing is figured out for sure next year, but he's really hoping to do multiple panels next year. I'm excited about that because frankly, I don't really play online Magic. Webcam Magic just isn't really for me. I tried watching
00:55:53
Speaker
some of the games throughout the weekend. It's just hard for me to follow. For me, it's just not a thing. I'm so ecstatic and so glad that Webcam Magic exists for everyone else who can engage with that content. That's fantastic, and I love that that medium exists. But for me, it just doesn't work. And so I'm hopeful, I'm excited about the potential next year.
00:56:15
Speaker
for multiple panels because that's some content that I feel like I can participate in a lot more readily than the games that have been the content in the past. So we'll see what happens with that. If you did participate, if you did watch or take part of any of that content this weekend and have some feedback, please direct that to Hobbs or some of the folks who were running that.
00:56:38
Speaker
I know every year they've been trying to make this thing bigger and better and figure out what else we can do to kind of really help with this. And this year, go to Hobbs for updates because he has all the final numbers and stuff, but it was really good. I mean, as you said, he should have said that beforehand. So, A, thank you for that, but also thanks for supporting us just in general. This podcast, we've been going for almost four years. We'll have our four-year
00:57:04
Speaker
anniversary next month at some point. And we got to figure out what to do with that. I guess I should get that, you start getting that worked out. But just the community support has been so much to us. And that's been a big thing that has kept us going. I mean, it's been also helpful for him and I. It's a great way for him and I to keep in contact despite the fact that we're in the same city. We have not seen each other much during the pandemic years because that's kind of how that worked.
00:57:30
Speaker
But so the podcast has been helpful for that, but also just the support from everybody has really
00:57:37
Speaker
we would have found another way to keep in contact if we weren't doing the podcast. But that has been so nice. We really appreciate that when we take breaks or when things are going on, all that support, both of us and each
Closing Thoughts and Gratitude
00:57:52
Speaker
other. I know on our Discord, we mention that every so often. And if you do want to join our Discord, let us know. Or maybe Hobbs, I know he can get people in. I probably could too, if you want to contact me.
00:58:02
Speaker
We really appreciate how supportive the people out there have been too. And so just everybody, as we're going through this Mental Health Awareness Month, we have one week left after you're listening to this. We have one more episode coming out this month. Obviously, that isn't the end of mental health topics for us, but it will probably take a little bit of a break. I know I'm working on one particular episode that we'll probably do in June that I'm excited about.
00:58:26
Speaker
But just take care of yourself. You're not alone. If you're going through issues, there's people who can help. And just take care of each other, too. Appreciate it. And have a good day.
00:58:40
Speaker
And that's our show for today. You can find the host on Twitter. HotzQ can be found at HotzQ and Alex Newman can be found at Mel underscore comical. Send any questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to at goblinmoorpod on Twitter or email us at goblinmoorpodcast at gmail.com.
00:58:58
Speaker
If you want to support your friendly neighborhood goblin, the cast can be found at patreon.com slash goblin web pod. Opening and closing music by Vindergarten, who can be found on twitter at Vindergarten, or online at vindergarten.bandcamp.com. Logo art by Steven Raphael, who can be found on twitter at steve raffle.
00:59:21
Speaker
Goblin Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast as part of their growing Vorthos content as well as magic content of all kinds. Check them out on Twitter at hipstersmtg or online at hipstersofthecoast.com. Thank you all for listening and remember goblins like snowflakes are only dangerous in numbers.