Mental Filtering: Do You Filter Out the Good or the Bad?

Mental filtering (or negative filtering) is a cognitive distortion, or a faulty thought pattern, that causes a person to ‘filter’ out positive events and focus on negative ones. 

Mental filtering occurs when we discard our pleasant memories and the emotions attached to them, and only keep the bad ones. Think about a sand sifter on the beach – we take a heap of sand, run it through our sifter, and hopefully end up with some neat shells or other surprises. Mental filtering is the opposite of this– we filter out the shells, and decide, “Hey, I’ll keep all this sand!”

Mental filtering is a cognitive distortion (thought error) that can contribute to depression
Does your mental filter leave you with the good stuff, or the bad?

What does mental filtering look like?

Here’s a quick example: Say you’re at a party, and you meet someone who works in your dream profession. We’ll call this person Jane. You strike up a conversation with Jane, make a connection, and before the conversation ends, Jane says, “Keep in touch, I may have an opportunity for you.”

Awesome. For the rest of the night, you feel great. But as you’re brushing your teeth before bed, you notice a little bit of food stuck between your two front teeth – “Oh no, has this food been stuck in my teeth all night!?” You try to tell yourself it must have just gotten stuck in there at the end of the night, but it’s no use. All you can think about is having food stuck in your teeth, and whether this may have caused Jane to think less of you. 

You’ve filtered out the beautiful sea shells, leaving yourself with a heap of sand — the fears, insecurities, and thoughts of self-doubt buried just under the surface.

Challenging Cognitive Distortions Worksheet PDF (Free Download)
Challenging Cognitive Distortions Worksheet (Free Download)
  • By a Licensed Therapist
  • Includes Example
  • PDF
  • Free

Your memory is a filter. But which way is the filter turned?

If this example sounds at all familiar to you, you’re in good company. We all have a negativity bias, or a tendency focus more on negative events than positive events (this is rooted in evolution, as negative events often pose a greater threat to survival than positive events). Further, we can’t expect to remember everything;  our minds filter out a lot of unneeded information, leaving us with the things we believe to be important.

 Learning from negative experiences is an important part of self-improvement. While the negativity bias can be adaptive, focusing too heavily on negative events can do much more harm than good. If negativity becomes a habit, depression can follow.

How to turn your mental filter around

Like most cognitive distortions, the first step toward managing your mental filter is to increase your awareness about it. When does your mental filter take over? Are there specific triggers that cause your filter to kick in? Because mental filtering relates to our interpretation of past events, it most often occurs during times of reflection: at night when trying to sleep, during a routine drive, on an idle afternoon, etc.

Once you understand how your mental filter works, you can gain more control over what you let in, and what you keep out.

Let’s go back to the example above:  You realize you had food stuck between your teeth while talking to an important person, which causes you to wonder if you blew an opportunity to advance your career. Let’s run the thoughts that make up this doomsday scenario through a filter and see what remains.

Challenge your assumptions

First, ask yourself whether your assumption might be false. What is your evidence in favor of the assumption, and what is the evidence against it? If you don’t know exactly when the food got stuck in your teeth, so you may be worrying about nothing.

Consider alternatives

Second, if there was food in your teeth, you don’t know for sure whether anyone noticed. You were probably a lot more attentive to the intricacies of your mouth while brushing your teeth at home than anyone else was while chatting with you at a social event. Remember that other people have just as much on their minds as you do on yours.

Reframe the event positively

Third, if the food was in your teeth, and anyone did see it, do you know for sure that it bothered anyone? Others can be more forgiving of our own imperfections than we can be. There probably aren’t many people who haven’t experienced something like this at some point. Besides, going with our example above, Jane encouraged you to keep in touch. Would she really have done that if you didn’t make a positive impression?

When you find your mental filter taking control, stop for a moment and flip it around. Can your negative thoughts stand up to scrutiny?

This is how you flip your filter around, and use it to your advantage: to filter out the things you don’t want.

Challenging Cognitive Distortions Worksheet PDF (Free Download)
Challenging Cognitive Distortions Worksheet (Free Download)
  • By a Licensed Therapist
  • Includes Example
  • PDF
  • Free

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  • Photograph licensed under Creative Commons zero.

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