5 Ways to Overcome Your All-or-Nothing Mindset

How to stop thinking in extremes

All-or-nothing thinking is considered one of the most common thinking errors, and typically leads to chronic internal and interpersonal issues. All-or-nothing thinking occurs when the brain is seeking certainty in states of stress. It’s most commonly identified with polarized thinking and includes words such as “always, never, everyone, everything, and every time.”

The brain wants to protect you from uncomfortable feelings by creating false sense of certainty through definitive thoughts. And ultimately, these thoughts influence your behaviors. For example, maybe you don’t attempt something unless you know you’ll be perfect at it, you have a hard time accepting other people’s perspectives, or you struggle with creative solutions when things don’t go according to plan. These are all signs that you may be defaulting to polarized thought patterns and thereby behaviors.

All-or-nothing thinkers also tend to catastrophize, and we have to understand that sometimes this is meant to be protective. It’s a form of protection in the sense that you are trying to prepare yourself and anticipate an undesirable outcome, rather than feel caught off guard, disappointed, or even out of control. But what ends up happening, is that you either:

1. Take the joy of a positive experience away from yourself

2. You emotionally live out the negative experience multiple times.

And that’s a lot of wasted energy.

And all-or-nothing thinking doesn’t just default to failure — it can also involve going to a positive extreme. This type of positivity that fails to acknowledge difficulties andminimizes ones experience is known as toxic positivity. Ironically, not truly positive at its core. So, if you know of someone who is outwardly and obnoxiously positive to avoid feelings of potential discomfort that would heighten anxiety, they are likely struggling with all-or-nothing thinking.

Regardless of whether it’s all positive or all negative thinking, repetitively engaging in this style of thinking will inevitably influence your behaviors and thereby your relationships. For example, if you’re consistently presenting as inflexible and uncompromising, then others may begin to experience you as stubborn, irrational, or unapproachable. So this type of thinking can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy. “I think people are unfriendly a holes, thereby I appear unapproachable with my body language/general tone. People internalize the cold exterior and don’t engage with me, so I reconfirm all people are unfriendly.”

5 steps to address all or nothing thinking:

1. Become aware you trend to this style of thinking

You must acknowledge that you’re trending toward this thought-style and accept that it’s not serving you. That’s often the biggest hurdle.

2. Regulate

If you have a difficult time tuning into your body and recognizing that you’re dysregulated, this type of thinking is going to be very difficult to address. Building attunement to yourself is a priority here. You can start this process by asking yourself what your level of frustration or anxiety is from a scale of 1-10 when you feel triggered. Then, ask yourself how your body is responding in the moment. Do you feel tension anywhere in particular? Are you experiencing an increased heartrate? Perhaps a sense of numbness? There is no judgement here- no good or bad. It is a process of tuning in and realizing, “huh, when I get upset (level 6) I am usually thinking that everything is going wrong, and my body responds with back pain.

3. Identify your underlying belief

Ask yourself what the story is you are telling yourself in this moment of activation. Notice if the actual experience is anxiety producing or if the way you were THINKING about it creates the anxiety. For example, are you nervous about a networking event or nervous about thinking you will appear nervous at the networking event.

4. Get curious and challenge the belief

Notice how specifically shifting into all or nothing thinking contributed to your feelings of anxiety and how this style of thinking is not serving you. Then, the next time something similar comes up- you can ask yourself to PAUSE and get curious. How did thinking this way work out for you? Is there another way you can think about this situation?

5. Identify A new effective belief

Is there another way you can think about this Situation? If you’re struggling with it, think about what would be the most helpful belief to have.

Episode Recap:

So, the major takeaway here is to attempt to move into what we like to call “the gray zone” – somewhere in the middle of the all-or-nothing spectrum. This applies to the overly positive on one side, “it’s all good thinkers” as well as those of us who trend towards thinking of the worst-case scenario. When thinking in absolutes we stifle our creativity and ultimately make it more difficult to see solutions and experience resilience. The good news is that once you recognize when you’re thinking in an unhelpful way, you can change the way you respond and effectively change the way you see yourself, others, and the world around you.