Does life ever seem to play out unfairly for you? Does it often feel like the walls are closing in on you and you can’t get out of a situation? Or that everything that is bad is only happening to you? If these statements feel true to you, it may be that you need to reframe the outlook on your life. And if you want to progress positively in your personal goals, relationships, career, and especially in your relationship with Allah, then there are certain unhelpful thinking styles that will impede in that.
Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, experienced many trials in his life, however, he never lost hope in Allah and tried to think positively about his situation, many times advising his followers to do the same. He has mentioned that a believer’s condition is always a win-win situation. Shuaib narrated that the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said:
“Amazing is the affair of the believer. Definitely, all of his life is good and this is not for anybody except the believer. If something of good happens to him, he is grateful and that is good for him. If something harmful befalls him, he is patient and that is good for him.”
(Saheeh Muslim #2999)
In our moments of despair or hardship, It is the ultimate show of positivity when we express belief and hope in Allah’s Mercy. As we have seen lately, our brothers and sisters in Palestine have time and again said “Alhamdulillah” (All Praise is to Allah) after suffering extreme injustice and hardships such as losing a loved one or facing starvation. SubhanAllah (Allah is Exalted). May Allah grant ease and comfort to them and all of our other brothers and sisters in Islam facing the same trials in this world. Ameen.
Unhelpful Thinking Styles
There is a list of thinking styles defined in the discipline of Psychology that many therapists use to explain their client’s outlook on life. When going through treatment, patients are often asked to ask themselves how they perceive a distressful situation so that they could eventually dismantle their negative style of thinking. These styles are defined below. See if you find yourself thinking in some of these patterns regularly.
According to Thrive Global, a software company that promotes positive behaviour through technology, and many other psychology-based resources, there is a general list of negative thinking styles that professionals use to help clients identify if they are using any of them in their daily life.1
Mental Filter: Focusing on only the negative aspects of a situation without touching upon the positive sides, creating a tunnel vision.
Example: A person who engages in mental filtering sees the glass half empty despite having succeeded or experienced positive things, and as a consequence, their anxiety worsens.
Black and White Thinking: Thinking in an absolute way where one thinks in the extremes rather than what can be in between. There is no such thing as nuance in this style of thinking.
Examples: Statements such as, “If you're not wealthy, you must be lazy” or “Some experts think AI will usher in the apocalypse, while others believe it will lead to a utopian future.”
Overgeneralizing: Perceiving a single negative event as the norm.
Example: While talking to someone, we learn they adhere to a different political ideology than we do. Based on this, we assume all kinds of things about the other person (overgeneralizing), causing feelings of anger or even disgust.
Personalization: Blaming yourself unnecessarily for external events.
Example: A mother blames herself for her child getting bullied in school. She says, “If I placed my child in a different school, this could have been avoided.”
Catastrophizing: Negatively exaggerating a situation. It seems that the walls are closing in or it is the “end of the world” when something does not go as you expected. And this happens often, even when life is quite mundane.
Example: A person says, “If I don't recover quickly from this procedure, I will never get better, and I will have a disability my entire life.”
Labeling: Using sweeping, negative statements to describe yourself or others.
Example: A person says, “I failed this test because I’m just not smart enough. I’ll never be smart enough.”
Magnification and Minimalization: Magnifying the positives in others, while discounting your own.
Example Magnification: Thinking that a minor disagreement with a friend is a sign that the entire friendship is doomed. Or saying, "I can't believe I forgot to turn in that report on time. My boss is going to be so mad and I'll probably get fired. My whole career is ruined."
Example Minimization: Believing that a major accomplishment or success is just luck or coincidence. A person may say, "I got a promotion at work, but it's probably just because the boss felt sorry for me. I'm not really that good at my job."
Jumping to Conclusions: Assuming we know what will happen or what someone is thinking without any evidence to support our claims. It also entails “Predictive Thinking” where we predict negative outcomes, usually overestimating negative emotions or experiences.
Example: When a person's friend walks past them in the street and ignores them one day, they immediately believe that their friend is having negative thoughts about them. That might be true, but a simpler explanation may be that the friend just didn't see them.
Emotional Reasoning: Assessing situations through a negative lens of what you are currently feeling.
Examples: A person says, “I feel anxious, so this must be dangerous/bad, so I must avoid it” or “If I feel disappointed, the restaurant did a bad job, it's someone else's fault.”
Should-have or Must-have Statements: Having unreasonable expectations for yourself.
Example: A person says, “I should have had this living room cleaned up before this unexpected guest came in. Other moms always have a tidy living room! Why can’t I?”
Our Past Affects Us
We may have developed these unhelpful types of thinking because of past traumas or the environment we were raised in. For example, an unpredictable caregiver can make one jump to conclusions, catastrophize, or even delve into personalization – where we blame ourselves for the problems created by the irrational adult.
Or it could be that your boss at work always criticized the work you did despite your best efforts, therefore, enabling you to magnify others’ efforts positively and minimize your own. Moreover, you may have a spouse, parent or sibling who consistently mentioned your negative traits, never praising you, causing you to make negative labels or make should-have statements about yourself. Furthermore, you may have gone through a series of difficult events in your life that lead you to overgeneralize or have a negative mental filter about eventual positive events of your life.
Therefore, we should treat ourselves gracefully, taking the time to heal our self-image and nuance our outlook on life.
Allah Is Always There for Us
Here are a few reminders from our Deen and some worldly practices that should help to dismantle these styles of thinking.
First and foremost, Allah has said in the Qur'an that believers should never lose hope in His Mercy when facing hardship. Allah says in Surah Yusuf:
“… and despair not of relief from Allah. Indeed, no one despairs of relief from Allah except the disbelieving people.”
(Surah Yusuf, 12:87)
This ayah stems from the story of Prophet Yusuf when his father Prophet Yaqub (peace be upon them), asked his sons to go find their missing younger brothers Yusuf and Binyamin. He was very distressed at their disappearance, as any parent would be in the event of a missing child, but he told his sons to not despair and have hope in Allah that He will keep them safe and bring them back. There are many examples of looking at distressing situations positively when it all seems to be going downhill. That is because Allah is in Control of everything that happens around us and in the universe.
Having trust and faith in His Power and Ability as He is Al-Qaadir, The Most Powerful with the ability to measure out everything. Whenever He decrees a thing, it is. And nothing can interrupt or disturb the will of Allah. He is the most capable without any limitations. Knowledge of this is what should drive us towards optimism as we have Him to handle it all. SubhanAllah.
We may feel distant from Allah if we have sinned too much or forgotten Allah because of overwhelming worldly matters. And that distance can cause us to have a dark cloud over our heads. We may feel that He won’t listen to us when making dua or supplication, because we are not keeping up with our prayers regularly, for example. Or we may feel that our problems are continuing to worry us because He may be angry with us. These styles of thinking are traps from Shaytan; he wants us to feel hopeless and languish in our problems. However, despite how negative you may feel when you are distant from Allah, we should (even then) not lose hope in His Mercy. As He relates in the Quran in Surah Az-Zumar:
“Say: ‘O My worshipers, who have sinned excessively against themselves, DESPAIR NOT of the Mercy of Allah! Verily, Allah forgives all sins. He is the Forgiver, the Most Merciful.”
(Surah Az-Zumar, 39:56)
When you are alone, turn back to Him and weep. Talk to him about all your worries and ask for forgiveness if you have done any wrong towards yourself or others. You can make this supplication when you are seeking His Mercy and Forgiveness:
“My Lord! Forgive and show mercy, for You are the Best of those who show mercy!”
رَّبِّ ٱغۡفِرۡ وَٱرۡحَمۡ وَأَنتَ خَيۡرُ ٱلرَّـٰحِمِينَ
[Rabbi’ghfir wa’rham wa anta khayru’l-raahimeen]
(Surah Al-Muminoon, 23:118)
Ask for His Help in thinking more positively about our situation and to fix the problems or ease whatever suffering you may be enduring. He is your Best Companion who will listen to all our sorrows and grievances about your life.
Seeking Professional Help
The best route towards improving our negative style of thinking is professional therapy. It can be with a psychotherapist, institutional counselor available at your college, workplace or mosque, or even a psychologist or psychiatrist if you have a debilitating condition such as clinical depression that is driving your negative thoughts.
Therapy helps to disentangle your past or current traumas or external difficulties one by one over time and reframe each of them in your mind in a way that shows that you are here alive and well in the present and have the chance to thrive, inshaAllah, God-willing.
One popular treatment professionals use to help a person undo a negative thinking style is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. This method suggests taking certain steps when you come across triggering situations. According to the trusted medical website, WebMd, Cognitive Behaviour Therapy works by helping you:
- Learn to recognize distortions in your thinking that create problems and counter your habits.
- Gain a better understanding of the behaviour and motivation of others.
- Use problem-solving skills to manage difficult situations.
- Get a greater sense of confidence in your own abilities.
- Move from extreme thinking to a more flexible and adaptable mindset.2
Self-Help Practices
There are several self-help practices that also rely on cognitive-behavioural methods. When you are triggered and feel like engaging in a negative behaviour or thought pattern, try doing the following:
1. Reframe your thinking.
If you catch yourself jumping to extreme conclusions about a situation or yourself in a triggering situation, try challenging those thoughts. Think about why you might be thinking the way you are and whether there is another viewpoint you may not have considered. If possible, leave the situation and write down your current thoughts and then a reconsideration of those thoughts in a journal or in the Notes app of your phone. Look at what you wrote later and see how you feel about those thoughts. You will likely find that you are surprised and may not feel that way when calm.
Thrive Global suggests making an Emotional Flow Map.3 You make five columns on a paper and label them: how you feel, what you think, what other people think, need for action, and the remedy. Here is an example:
Situation: “I got a negative review at work.”
Writing our thoughts out every time we are triggered can eventually become our new thinking style if we keep at it, inshaAllah.
2. Watch your words.
If we engage in black-and-white thinking or overgeneralization where words such as, “always” and “never” are a normal part of our vocabulary, then these are signals you need to pay attention to. Next time you hear yourself use those words in a statement, try to replace those words with “maybe” and “sometimes.” See how much your thinking will change. You will notice yourself calm down as you consider that certain situations aren’t always as extreme as we make them out to be.
3. Acceptance.
One constant in life is change. Try to be comfortable with the fact that not knowing everything is okay. It is alright to ask for more time to consider a situation or mull over a problem. It is alright to say, “I don’t know,” and be free of the anxiety of not knowing. We are only human and are always learning as we grow.
Once we accept that our life runs by the Decree of Allah, we can feel at ease thinking that we can get through anything because Allah does not burden us with what we can’t handle:
“Allah does not burden a soul beyond that it can bear.”
(Surah Al-Baqarah, 2:286)
Lastly, and most importantly, our Prophet, peace and blessing be upon him, relates in a Hadith Qudsi, a Prophetic saying directly by Allah:
“Allah says, ‘O son of Adam, so long as you call on Me and put your hope in Me, I will forgive whatever you have done, and I will not mind. O son of Adam, even if your sins were to reach the clouds of the sky, then you were to seek My forgiveness, I would forgive you and I will not mind. O son of Adam, if you were to come to me with an earthful of sins, and you were to meet Me not associating anything in worship with Me, I will come to you with an earthful of forgiveness.'”
(Tirmidhi)
Read this beautiful hadith whenever you are in distress, my brother or sister in Islam. Allah is reassuring you that despite whatever negative situation you are in, He will always be there for you as He is Al-Baqi, The Everlasting. He will always exist and never cease to be.
End Notes
1 Unhelpful Thinking Styles - Thrive Global (with infographic)
2 Black and White Thinking: Causes, Symptoms, and More
3 Use These Journal Prompts to Change Your Thinking - Thrive Global
Sumayya Khan is a homeschooling mother of two and a teacher. She has worked with several Islamic schools and organizations in the last 10 years. She is currently teaching Literature online with Dawanet and studying the Qur’an through Al-Huda Institute. In her free time, she loves to spend time with her family and friends, play sports, enjoy nature, and read books. She currently resides with her family in Toronto, Canada.
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