Book recommendations for thinking about cognitive distortions
December 25, 2018 7:16 AM Subscribe
I'm hoping to find a book (or books) discussing the idea of cognitive distortions to help me think more deeply on the though patterns beyond what I've worked through with a therapist so far. I'd love to find something similar to "Quiet" by Susan Cain. I found this book really engaging and it helped stimulate a lot of productive thinking.
Talking with my therapist helped a ton with this, and now I find I'm at a place where I'm interested in casually exploring how distorted thinking is still part of my daily life even though it's not an acute problem for me anymore. I have a copy of "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by Dr. David Burns" and couldn't really get into the workbook-style format of it.
Talking with my therapist helped a ton with this, and now I find I'm at a place where I'm interested in casually exploring how distorted thinking is still part of my daily life even though it's not an acute problem for me anymore. I have a copy of "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by Dr. David Burns" and couldn't really get into the workbook-style format of it.
I found Leadership and Self-Deception really useful in identifying some unhelpful relationship patterns I had. It's framed as a business thing, but it was really more useful to me on an interpersonal level.
posted by restless_nomad at 8:21 AM on December 25, 2018
posted by restless_nomad at 8:21 AM on December 25, 2018
I'll have some title suggestions in a day or so (too busy right now), but I'd like to suggest that there are a lot of better-resourced books on behavior than Susan Cain's, and if you're looking for suggestions for self-development, you might want to read popular-science literature with a bit of a skeptical eye (but do read it).
I'd go with writings based on social psychology rather than self-help (Cain is a failed lawyer who went into the business of counseling and consulting, if I remember right), but first read some articles about the replication crisis in social psychology so as to take that stuff with a grain of salt as well. I read a tremendous amount of this kind of literature and I think skepticism is warranted, especially when dealing with good writers like Malcolm Gladwell (or Susan Cain) who are basically good storytellers but not researchers and who are often telling a compelling just-so story made up out of whole cloth. I personally think that Susan Cain's book's popularity did a TREMENDOUS amount of damage to a generation of people who read it at formative times, and that it's not in the slightest bit supported by evidence. I personally blame the concepts in that book for a lot of my depressed/anxious friends' NOT making more progress in handling the social anxiety aspects of their respective conditions (it was formative for a bunch of my now-mid-30's friends just as they were leaving college and "working on themselves" in therapy or whatever for the first time).
There's something of a boundary between popular science books on human behavior and self-help books that are more anecdote-driven with a pinch of cherrypicked science, and that boundary is very interesting. There's no rule that says that science books are doing justice to their topic, and there's no rule that says that self-help literature is automatically bad to begin with- it's incredibly hard to research human behavior and we can't just sit around and wait until science figures it all out before presenting a popular-readership version- because the 'figuring it out' is going to take generations. However as i'm sure you're aware self-help type literature often masquerades as being science writing, which has a lot of weight in our culture. Sometimes the self-help books do a much better job of making a compelling-sounding case just on the strength of good writing.
There's something of a pop literature on cognitive biases and that touches on the distortions you're probably interested in - a very good introduction to this stuff is the work of David McRaney, who also runs an excellent podcast on the topic of human irraitonality in general. Some of it is applicable to self-help/self-development and some of it is just plain old entertaining. I highly recommend You Are Not So Smart as a sort of basic primer on what research has said about human irrationality. It won't talk about, say, black-and-white thinking (one of the things from your Cognitive Distortions link) but I think that reading that light, entertaining book about research may help one to understand how prone we all are to wildly distorted self-perceptions, which may make it easier to see when one's engaging in something like black-and-white thinking.
posted by twoplussix at 1:23 PM on December 25, 2018 [8 favorites]
I'd go with writings based on social psychology rather than self-help (Cain is a failed lawyer who went into the business of counseling and consulting, if I remember right), but first read some articles about the replication crisis in social psychology so as to take that stuff with a grain of salt as well. I read a tremendous amount of this kind of literature and I think skepticism is warranted, especially when dealing with good writers like Malcolm Gladwell (or Susan Cain) who are basically good storytellers but not researchers and who are often telling a compelling just-so story made up out of whole cloth. I personally think that Susan Cain's book's popularity did a TREMENDOUS amount of damage to a generation of people who read it at formative times, and that it's not in the slightest bit supported by evidence. I personally blame the concepts in that book for a lot of my depressed/anxious friends' NOT making more progress in handling the social anxiety aspects of their respective conditions (it was formative for a bunch of my now-mid-30's friends just as they were leaving college and "working on themselves" in therapy or whatever for the first time).
There's something of a boundary between popular science books on human behavior and self-help books that are more anecdote-driven with a pinch of cherrypicked science, and that boundary is very interesting. There's no rule that says that science books are doing justice to their topic, and there's no rule that says that self-help literature is automatically bad to begin with- it's incredibly hard to research human behavior and we can't just sit around and wait until science figures it all out before presenting a popular-readership version- because the 'figuring it out' is going to take generations. However as i'm sure you're aware self-help type literature often masquerades as being science writing, which has a lot of weight in our culture. Sometimes the self-help books do a much better job of making a compelling-sounding case just on the strength of good writing.
There's something of a pop literature on cognitive biases and that touches on the distortions you're probably interested in - a very good introduction to this stuff is the work of David McRaney, who also runs an excellent podcast on the topic of human irraitonality in general. Some of it is applicable to self-help/self-development and some of it is just plain old entertaining. I highly recommend You Are Not So Smart as a sort of basic primer on what research has said about human irrationality. It won't talk about, say, black-and-white thinking (one of the things from your Cognitive Distortions link) but I think that reading that light, entertaining book about research may help one to understand how prone we all are to wildly distorted self-perceptions, which may make it easier to see when one's engaging in something like black-and-white thinking.
posted by twoplussix at 1:23 PM on December 25, 2018 [8 favorites]
Stay far, far away from Byron Katie. Pure garbage.
posted by Violet Hour at 8:48 PM on December 25, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by Violet Hour at 8:48 PM on December 25, 2018 [2 favorites]
The book DO NOTHING is a clear introduction to how thinking shapes our experience of life. I also recommend Somebody Should Have Told Us by Jack Pransky, who wrote the preface/introduction to DO NOTHING.
posted by Altomentis at 3:08 AM on December 27, 2018
posted by Altomentis at 3:08 AM on December 27, 2018
This thread is closed to new comments.
The front page of her website is, to me, a little offputtingly sales-driven, so I'm linking to The Work, which is the part I've found most useful.
posted by vytae at 7:27 AM on December 25, 2018