Math Problems with Zero Answers

Here are some Mad Girl Math problems where the answer is always zero.  More specifically, “I am nothing.”

1.       I ate well for the last ten days and felt great.  Today I had one package of Red Vines.  I will cheat again and again.  I am a loser.

2.       I’ve lost two pounds per week for the past three weeks.  This week I lost zero.  It’s over. This diet won’t work.   I will never lose weight; I will be fat forever.

3.       I have received all “A’s” on my exams so far at school.  I got a “B” on my practicum.  Everything is falling apart.  I suck; I am stupid.

4.       I just got my review at work.   I got a “5” (the highest score) on every area except coming to work on time.  I’ve been tardy four days in the past year.  I am a horrible employee.

These problems are debunked in Feeling Good, by David D. Burns.  Originally published in 1980, this is still one of the best-selling self-help books of all time.  In it, Burns talks about ten cognitive distortions that keep us depressed and limit our ability to see the world as it really is. 

I bring it up because Mad Girl Math, regardless of the equation, generally relates to one of these 10 cognitive distortions:

1.       All or Nothing Thinking:  You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.

2.       Overgeneralization:  You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.

3.       Mental Filter:   You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like a drop of ink that colors an entire beaker of water.

4.       Disqualifying the Positive:  You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or another, maintaining a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences.

5.       Jumping to Conclusions:  You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts to convincingly support your conclusion – you read minds, or tell the future.

6.       Magnification and Minimization:  You exaggerate the importance of things (your errors or imperfections) or inappropriately shrink things (your desirable qualities or someone else’s imperfections).

7.       Emotional Reasoning:  You assume your negative emotions reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.”

8.       Should Statements:  You try to motivate yourself with “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts”, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything.

9.       Labeling and Mislabeling:  An extreme form of overgeneralization, instead of describing your error, you attach a label to yourself.

10.   Personalization:  You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.

Here’s the good news about cognitive distortions:  we can overcome them with awareness and practice.  And while you might not be clinically depressed, if you engage regularly in Mad Girl Math, your thinking may well be distorted in some way.

In Feeling Good, The Feeling Good Handbook, and Ten Days to Self Esteem, David Burns provides practical exercises to overcome this kind of Mad Girl Math.

http://www.amazon.com/David-D.-Burns/e/B00455GNDO/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1365959069&sr=8-2-ent

Today is day six without the numbers.  I’m listening to the story problems in my head, and checking them for faulty equations.