Our thoughts can strongly influence how we feel and respond to situations. Sometimes, especially during periods of stress, anxiety, or low mood, our minds can fall into unhelpful thinking patterns that may create or exacerbate already difficult to manage feelings.
Left unchecked, ANTs can take a massive toll on your mental health—fueling stress, anxiety, and depression while hijacking your logical decision-making.
In psychology, Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs) are beliefs that warp how we see reality. Because these thoughts trigger automatically, they easily become deep-rooted habits. If you don’t know what to look for, they are incredibly hard to spot, leading many people to simply accept them as “just the way things are.”
To help you protect your peace of mind and spot these stubborn mental habits, here are broken down 11 common ANTs that might be quietly distorting your reality and robbing you of your peace of mind:
1. Catastrophizing
This ANT takes a minor bump in the road and turns it into an absolute disaster. If you fail one quiz, this thought pattern convinces you that you’ll flunk the whole class and never graduate. It can even strike before an event even happens, forcing you to assume the absolute worst-case scenario before you’ve even given it a shot.
2. Mindreading
This ANT convinces you that you have psychic powers, making you certain you know exactly what someone else is thinking or feeling. For instance, if a coworker yawns while you’re speaking in a meeting, you instantly decide, “They think I’m completely boring and incompetent.” In reality, you have zero evidence to back that up—they probably just didn’t sleep well.
3. Fortune Telling
A fortune-telling ANT acts like a broken crystal ball that only predicts bad news. It arbitrarily decides a future event will end in disaster before it even starts. For example, before heading to a job interview, you might tell yourself, “There’s no point in even trying, I’m going to freeze up and ruin my chances.”
4. Overgeneralization
This pattern takes a single negative event and uses it to write a permanent rule for your entire life. It relies heavily on absolute words like “always,” “never,” or “everyone.” For example, if you stumble over your words during a single presentation at work, this ANT steps in to declare, “I always mess up public speaking, I never get things right, and everyone thinks I’m unqualified.”
5. Labeling
An extreme version of overgeneralization, this ANT takes one isolated incident and uses it to slap a permanent, global label on yourself or someone else. For example, if you burn a batch of cookies, instead of thinking, “I overbaked this batch,” you slap a label on your identity and think, “I am a terrible cook and completely incompetent in the kitchen.”
6. Discounting the Positive
This ANT acts like a reverse filter, actively transforming good news into something meaningless. Instead of just ignoring the positive, it finds a way to explain it away. For instance, if you cook a fantastic dinner and your guests rave about it, you tell yourself, “They’re just saying that to be polite, anyone can follow a recipe.”
Changing the Habit: The good news is that these mental habits aren’t permanent. Through a process in cognitive behavioral therapy called cognitive restructuring, we can learn to spot, name and challenge our ANTs. By actively reframing these automatic thoughts, we regain control over our emotions and actions.
7. Black-and-White Thinking
This pattern leaves no room for nuance, forcing everything into strict “either/or” categories. To this ANT, you are either perfect or a failure, and a situation is either entirely good or entirely bad. It completely ignores the middle ground—the shades of gray where reality and the most reasonable solutions usually live.
8. Personalization
This ANT makes you the center of problems you didn’t cause. If a friend is quiet, you assume they are mad at you. If an event gets rained out, you feel somehow responsible. It tricks you into taking things personally and carrying the blame for situations that are completely out of your control.
9. “Should” Statements
Whenever your internal monologue relies heavily on “should,” “must,” or “ought to,” you are likely dealing with this ANT. For yourself, it sounds like, “I should have worked harder,” which only breeds guilt and shame. When applied to others—like thinking, “They should have known better”—it sets up unrealistic expectations that lead directly to anger, frustration, and resentment.
10. Emotional Reasoning
This ANT treats your internal feelings as absolute truth, assuming that your emotions reflect objective reality. For example, if you wake up feeling a wave of intense anxiety about a normal, routine meeting at work, your mind tells you, “Because I feel completely terrified right now, it must mean my boss is planning to fire me today.”
11. Control Fallacy
This ANT splits people into two extremes of distorted control. If you lean toward internal control, you feel personally responsible for things completely outside your power—like thinking, “My friend seemed stressed at lunch, so I must have said something wrong to ruin their day.” If you lean toward external control, you view yourself as a helpless victim of fate, thinking, “There’s no point in applying for that new job because the hiring manager probably already has a favorite anyway.”
By slowing down and examining your thoughts, you may discover new perspectives, reduce emotional distress, and respond to the situation with greater clarity and balance.