If you find yourself thinking that everyone else has it together, or that you'll never finish your paper, or that you always procrastinate, this is the episode for you. These are examples of "all-or-nothing thinking" where we take a really black and white view on the world and forget to see all the shades of grey. The problem with all-or-nothing thinking is that it feels pretty rubbish, encourages us to focus on our "fails", and makes it harder to change our behaviour. In this episode, I help you figure out how to spot all-or-nothing thinking in yourself, and give you some tips to deal with it.
*Important note. People with anxiety or depression may experience a lot of all-or-nothing thinking. If you have mental health conditions like these, you may wish to work on your all-or-nothing thinking with your counsellor or other clinical practitioner, so that they can help you uncover some of the root causes and help you process any trauma safely. This episode is aimed at people who are finding that they're increasing their own stress a bit with some all-or-nothing thinking and who would like to learn some techniques to move their goals forward.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to episode 31 of the PhD Life Coach. Today we're going to be thinking about all or nothing thinking. I used to tell myself a lot that I never stick to anything. That was a phrase that went around my head, more than I can to admit. And whether it was a new planning system for work or an exercise regime or some healthy eating plan, I would have a go and I would tell myself that I'm going to do it this time. It's going to be different. And then when I inevitably stopped, I would tell myself, well, you never stick to anything, do you?
And it was just a thought that I accepted as completely true. I was someone who never stuck to anything, and it wasn't until I started getting coaching and really looking at the power of my thoughts and thinking about where they came from, that I realized how much that thought’s not true and not helpful.
It's a really all or nothing thought. Notice that “never” word in there. I never stick to anything, not. I sometimes find it difficult to stick to this, but not that. I stick to things in this circumstances, but not in those circumstances. What does “stick to” even mean? What level of compliance counts as sticking to, but no, it was an absolute statement that I never stick to things. Absolute classic, all or nothing thinking. It's the same as thinking “I always got distracted”, which is another one I used to tell myself a lot. I never stick to anything. I always get distracted.
It's important this week for me to be clear on the scope of what I'm going to be talking about today. All on nothing thinking is something that is known as a cognitive distortion. It means that it's a sort of error in our thought processes and it's something that will often get talked about by psychologists and psychiatrists in the context of mental health problems. So if you have anxiety, depression, other mental health conditions, um, you may have experienced all or nothing thinking and be working on that with your therapists, counsellors, and other medical practitioners.
In those scenarios, you might be having quite extreme issues with all or nothing thinking. You may be having thoughts where it's querying your entire value, your place in this world, and so on. And if you are experiencing those sorts of all or nothing thoughts, I really encourage you to speak to the counselling services at your university if you're a student or Or to speak to your doctor or other professional advice.
What I'm going to be thinking about today is the sort of all or nothing thinking that prevents us from getting stuff done that we want to get done or achieving our goals, not the sort of all or nothing thinking that's really threatening our mental health. Now, if you are in that situation, you might still find this episode interesting and useful, so I'm not saying go away. But if you are experiencing mental health problems at the moment, you might not find it easy to apply some of the hints that I'm giving it towards the end of this session. So have a listen, stay involved. It's wonderful to have you here, but please try and make any changes in the context of the clinical support that you deserve in your situation.
So, let me give you an example of the type of all or nothing thinking that we're going to be talking about today. I had a client recently who is towards the end of her PhD and was feeling like she had lots to do and that it wasn't going to fit into her normal pattern of work. She was telling herself that I'm going to have to work all weekend. And I want you to notice the words there. I'm going to “have to”, so there's no decision there. There's no kind of nuance. No “well, I could, or I don't have to”, but “I have to. I must. And I have to work all weekend.”
And the problem was when this client told herself that she had to work all weekend, she was finding herself resisting it. And in those situations, what she'd end up doing is either working all weekend but feeling really miserable all the way through, or she'd end up not working at all because she was really resisting this voice in her head that was telling her she had to work and it was all weekend and nothing else was good enough. And so it became like, well if she hadn't worked on Saturday morning, then she might as well sack it off and try again another weekend because she wasn't going to work all weekend.
And I've seen this across lots of different PhD students, lots of different academics. It's an example of all or nothing thinking, turning into all or nothing behaviour. Because she thought she had to work all weekend, she either ended up working all weekend or not working at all or if she did something in between calling it a fail anyway.
Another example that I saw recently was a PhD student who had got feedback back from a supervisor and it was more extensive than they were expecting. That ended up in this all or nothing feeling of, “I need to do all of these things or it's not going to be good enough”. “If there's this many comments, I'm probably not going to be able to, I won't be able to finish this paper. I'm probably not good enough to be here.”
So there was a big chunk of all or nothing thinking with a little bit of catastrophizing where you kind of snowball, this means this, which means this, which means this thrown in for good measure. So these are the sorts of all or nothing thinking that I'm really talking about today. And I bet if you're a PhD student or an academic, you have probably experienced them, I'm going to say in the last fortnight, because these are really common. I certainly see them come up in my client sessions all the time, whether they're my one-to-one sessions or my group coaching. And the problem is even though they're common, it doesn't stop them being really painful. It means that we're less likely to get on with something if we think we have to be perfect, we have to do it in its entirety. We're much less likely to start and find ourselves procrastinating.
It means that we don't recognize the progress we have made. We have a tendency to think that if we didn't do everything we intended, then we failed, it wasn't good enough. I didn't stick to my diary, for example. It means we focus on our flaws. We notice the nothings, we notice the bits where we didn't do everything we intended, and we attribute that to our flaws instead of noticing some of the places where we bought our strengths and achieved some of the things we intended. And all of this, if it's left unreflected on and unlooked at can lead to us getting really lower confidence in not achieving our goals and not achieving our goals.
So this episode is called How to Spot and Stop All or Nothing Thinking, and that's because spotting it is a massively important first step. Most of the time when I point this out to newer clients, it hadn't even crossed their mind that they were doing all or nothing thinking. They kind of knew what the concept was when I mentioned it, but they hadn't noticed it in their thoughts at all.
And what I love to see, particularly with my clients that I work with for a long period of time, so for example, my students who are in the PhD life coach membership, I see them over time start to notice. So when we are coaching now, they will sometimes say, “I know this is all or nothing thinking, but it's what's going on in my brain at the moment” and that being able to recognize it is an incredibly important first step.
So how do you go about spotting this sort of thing? Well, the first thing you can look out for is very extreme words. I want you to notice if you are thinking always never success failure everyone. Everyone else is doing more work than me. Everyone else is more successful than me. No one procrastinates the way I procrastinate, for example.
So anytime you notice those extreme thoughts, those really binary, categorical words. Always, never, everyone, no-one, none. Success, failure, those sorts of things. I wanted just to raise a little flag in your head and go, ah, hang on. That was one of those categorical words. That was one of those extreme words. Did I really mean that? And we'll talk in a second about what things you can do when you notice it, but noticing it is a big issue.
One tip that can help with this, particularly if like me, you've got a brain that goes 400 miles an hour sometimes writing down what you are thinking can make it easier to spot these things. So if you are finding yourself just getting yourself a bit stressed, because there's lots going on in your head, grabbing a piece of paper, writing it down, and then looking for these words is another way where you can spot where you are having all or nothing thoughts.
The other sorts of words I want you to look for, whether it's in your mind or in your written thoughts, is big superlative words. So where everything's terrible, it's awful, it's a disaster. All those sorts of words. Even sometimes, to be honest, the positive ones, if I do this, everything will be amazing.
I want you to look out for those sorts of words as well, because again, they can indicate this sort of extreme all or nothing thinking. And now, as always, when you're looking at this stuff, we have to come at this from a place of compassion. There's nothing wrong with you if you're doing all or nothing thinking, okay.
If it's severely affecting your mental health, then seeking some support for that would be brilliant. But there's nothing broken here. It's totally normal to experience this stuff, but we don't have to have it like this. We can manage it differently to make it a little easier and to spot it.
So first of all, when we notice it, please try and avoid then going, “oh gosh, I'm so stupid. I'm doing all or nothing, thinking I'm making this worse”, and kind of beating up on yourself. The fact you've noticed this is amazing. The fact you're beginning to reflect on your thoughts and think about the impact they have is huge. And now what we get to do is we get to take that insight and compassionately and non-judgmentally think about how can we address that in ourselves.
So there's a few different approaches you can take here. I find humour helps enormously. Now you have to be careful. If you're in the extremes of negative emotions, then this may not work for you. But if you are just finding yourself getting a bit het up about something, I sometimes find that repeating it to myself or to my client can really help but doing it in that sort of lighthearted way.
So “no one, no, no one has ever felt like this. No, you're right. No one. No one in the history of the world has ever procrastinated. Does that sound right to you? Every single person in your department has four publications every year, do they? Is that true?”
So just bringing a slightly lighthearted kind of, “Terrible. Yeah, it's going to be awful. They'll probably kick you out. It'll be dreadful.” usually makes my clients giggle when I say it because they see how extreme it is when you make it that little bit more extreme, but in a comedy way, then they kind of “go, yeah, no, I know. I don't really mean that. That's not what I really mean”, which is exactly how you want to try and stimulate it.
Like I said, don't try this in for you in the midst of feeling really down and really sad about it and things like that, you know, little bit Mickey taking never goes down well when you're feeling particularly vulnerable, but when you're just feeling a bit frustrated and overwhelmed and those sorts of things, being able to take that step back and have a little giggle about yourself can really, really help.
And the thing I love about that most is it just shows that we don't have to make these thoughts go away. It's fine that you are having some all or nothing thinking. It happens to everybody. We don't have to make those all or nothing. Thoughts completely disappear. We just have to help them lose their power a little bit.
It's kind of the cognitive equivalent of imagining your audience in their underpants. It doesn't make them go away. It just makes them a little bit more ridiculous and a little bit less threatening. If we can make these all or nothing thoughts a little bit more ridiculous and a little bit less threatening, then they suddenly don't have the power over us quite as much as they did before.
Once we've got ourselves to a place where we're not in the midst of a spiral, but we're feeling a little bit calmer and able to look at our thoughts a bit more, we can ask ourselves the questions that I often talk about on this podcast, my three favorite questions. Is it true? What else is true? And what if it is true and that's okay.
So we can start to look at the truth of it. Is it true that you're going to have to work all weekend? How much are we actually talking about? What else is true? Well, it's also true that I could find time to have coffee with my friend. It's also true that I actually probably don't need to do that one piece of work, so I could work a little bit less this weekend if I could just put that one off. And what if it's true and that's okay? Okay. You're going to have to work all weekend on your PhD that you chose on a topic that you love. So how can this be okay? Maybe you do have to work all this weekend. Maybe we reframe it that you're choosing to work all this weekend, and then we start to think, how can I make it really lovely to work all this weekend? So you either dig holes in it, you find other truths you also believe, or you work out a way that that can be true and it be completely okay.
Similarly, if it feels like everyone in your department is getting publications except you, is that true? What else is true? That you are part-time. It's also true that you are running a longitudinal study. It's also true that you are using a hard-to-access archive. It's also true that you've got a ton of experience giving presentations where most people haven't got that.
And then what if it's true and that's okay. What if that means you work in a department with a whole bunch of really clever, amazing students? Wicked. A little bit like I talked about in the episode last week about imposter syndrome, what an amazing opportunity to be surrounded by people who know how to publish. Let's go learn from them. Let's go pick their brains. Let's figure out how we can do this too. So just by asking those three questions, again, we can take a little bit of the sting out of these all or nothing thoughts.
Building on that. Some people talk about an approach to all or nothing thinking, being to look at the positive. And people who know me, you know I like to look at the positive. That's kind of my thing, a lot of the time. I'm known for being kind of chirpy, but it's not necessarily everyone's thing. And there's a whole load of people that get really turned off by the idea of, “oh, let's just see the positive” and find it all a bit sugary and sweet and not authentic even.
And so I'm not going to say, look at the positive. What I'm going to say instead is, let's be specific. Let's be clear and accurate here. So in the examples I gave, if you need to work this weekend, how many hours? Why that many? How do you know if you think everybody else has got published in your department? How many people, how many publications?
Let's be specific. We don't have to be positive, we just have to be accurate. And I almost guarantee that every time you are having an all or nothing thought, when you get specific about it, then it starts to crumble and it starts to not look quite so all or nothing.
Now, I mentioned at the beginning that one of the things I used to have all or nothing thoughts about was that I never stick to anything, and this whole getting specific approach really, really helped me to address that and learn to take those thoughts a lot less seriously.
I'm not going to say I don't still have them, but I take them a lot less seriously and that's cause I got specific about it. When you start to get specific, you start to see the nuance. You start to see the detail around the thing that you are saying about yourself or the situation, and then suddenly it doesn't become all or nothing.
You start to see the shades of gray that sit between black and white. I no longer believe that. I never stick to anything. I believe that I'm somebody who needs to put a certain amount of scaffolding in place in order to make it more likely that I'll do more of the things I intend to do. I think that is true, but I'm somebody who in a lot of situations will persistently turn up for something, and that's a lot different.
Now it's also important to allow for paradoxes. So what do I mean by that? Paradox is where two things are true that look like they're opposing, but they are actually both true. Again, an example from my life, I believe, I still believe, that I'm somebody who procrastinates quite a lot, who “wastes” a lot of time, because it's probably objectively true.
I'm not going to use all or nothing words. I'm not going to say I always waste time, but it's something that I, I'm constantly working on, but I believe it about myself. But on the other hand, I also believe I'm somebody who gets an awful lot done. I used to focus very much on the fact that I waste so much time. I really beat myself up about it and partly through the support, as I've talked before of Professor Jen Cumming who does a lot of strengths-based work, I've really learned the benefit of focusing on the other side, focusing on the fact that I get an awful lot of stuff done. And I find that the more, I think that I get an awful lot of stuff done, the more I get stuff done and the less I procrastinate. Whereas the more I think that I'm someone who wastes time, the more I waste time.
The key here has been accepting that both are true. If I needed to believe that I am someone who gets lots done and I don't waste time, I would really struggle with that because I have lots of evidence that I waste time. But now that I can allow both of those things to be true in my head, even though they seem contradictory to each other, so much easier, and now I just choose to spend more time thinking that I'm someone who gets lots of stuff done and less time thinking that I'm somebody who wastes lots of time.
So allow those paradoxes. If you are feeling like, I got so much negative feedback on my draft that I probably shouldn't be here, you can allow the thought “wow, I got a lot of changes on my document. That's disappointing.” You can have that thought, but you can also have the thought, “but I can work through them systematically.”
So you are allowing those two things to be true. You're allowing it to be disappointing that you got as many comments as you did when you thought you were nearly done, but also to believe that it's possible for you to just work through them one by one and get it done.
And that leads on to another tip, which is about seeking partial success. So one of the big challenges with all or nothing thinking is that when we tell ourselves we have to stick to our new schedule or everything will be awful, I'll never get all this work done. As soon as you don't stick to it a bit, then the tendency is to just give up trying.
I'm working on a version of time blocking where at the beginning of the week you kind of plan out roughly when you're going to do key things so that you decide ahead of time. Decision making is one of the things that I find slows me down. If I need to make a decision about what to do, I can faff about. Whereas if I've decided in advance what it is, then I get on a lot better.
And one of the things we know with time management tools like time blocking, is that people tend to start very gung ho. They start very, “I need to schedule everything. I need a new planner.” Listen to episode two. If you think you need a new planner. “I need a new planner and I need to schedule everything, and then I need to stick to everything.”
And then they get to Tuesday afternoon and they realize they haven't stuck to some of the things, and so they don't stick to any more of the week. They give up on the whole technique, or they didn't say it hasn't worked for them, or they say, oh, well, I'll try again next week and next week I'm going to stick to everything.
And that's a real example of all or nothing thinking, that these tools are only useful if you stick to them at a hundred percent. And if you don't stick to them a hundred percent, then it wasn't worth it. You know, this approach has failed for you. What I would really encourage you to do is seek partial success.
So if on the Tuesday afternoon you are realizing that you haven't stuck to it as much as you would've liked, let’s figure it out. First, get specific, like we said before, how much have you stuck to it? You’ve probably stuck to it more than you think. Which hours were you doing the things you intended to do? Wicked. How now for the rest of the week, can we get that number a bit higher?
Instead of sacking it off and going, oh, well, I've messed it up, we can go right? At the moment I've stuck to about 40% of it, but I reckon with a good day tomorrow I could get that up to 50%. And then who knows what we could do Thursday, Friday, let's go. Let's see how high a proportion we can get here.
Allowing for partial success allows us to reengage when it feels like things are going to downhill. It's the same with exercise. So sometimes, and again, this is something I'm still working on for myself, but sometimes we think, oh, “I haven't got time to go to the gym. I can't do any exercise.” Whereas if we can say, I can't go to the gym, so I'm not going to do the full workout that I'd planned, but I can do some stretching in front of the tv, or I can try and do 30 press ups over the course of the next 30 minutes, or whatever it might be. But you know, I haven't got time to go for my full walk, but I can go for 10 minutes. So let's do that. Allowing for partial success allows you to sort of pick up as soon as you notice things aren't quite where you'd planned and still get something out of it.
And the important bit is that with your partial success, you recognize it as it's happening so that you can make decisions that you pick up as you go along, but then you also congratulate yourself. You are so proud of yourself afterwards because achieving 70% of your time blocking plans, or whatever it is, is still such an achievement in ourselves, whereas when we got this all or nothing habit, we'll see 70% as less than a hundred, and therefore I failed. I didn't stick to my plan. Let's recognize, praise, and be proud of partial success.
The other thing with all or nothing thinking, and we touched on this slightly at the beginning, is that it can really rapidly lead into catastrophizing. It can really fast go from if “I don't work all this weekend, I won't get this done.” That can very quickly slip into, “and if I don't get this done, then my supervisor's going to be angry with me. And then if my supervisor's angry with me, they probably won't give me a reference. And if they don't give me a reference, then I'm never going to get a job. And if I never get a job, then this is all a complete waste of time. And I don’t know why I ever signed up for my PhD in the first place. I shouldn't be here.”
It's really quick. And I know those of you listening are going to be like, “yeah, I've been down that spiral.” It's really easy for all or nothing thinking to turn into those sorts of spirals because you start with quite a catastrophic description at the beginning.
So with all of this stuff, be careful what you are making it mean. If you notice that you never do something, you are going to query it the way we said, but also, what are you making that mean about you? Maybe you don't ever stick to something. Think it's unlikely, but maybe you never do.
Okay. What are you making that mean about you? Are you making that mean you are lazy? You're useless? What are you making that mean? Because sometimes things can just be true without having to mean all the things we're putting on it. So maybe, if you don't work all this weekend, then you're not going to finish that paper before the deadline. What does that have to mean? The only thing that means if it's true is that you won't finish that paper this weekend. Does it have to mean everything else you're saying? No. Maybe you'll publish it somewhere else. Maybe you'll write a different paper instead. Maybe it'll go in your thesis and never exist beyond your thesis and be read by two people. There's lots of us that have got those papers in our thesis is, don't worry, it happens. It doesn't have to mean all the drama.
But when you start with this kind of catastrophic all or nothing thinking, there's so much drama tied up in that that it's just easy to snowball out. So just be cautious what you're making it mean.
Now finally, with your all-or-nothing thinking, please don't get all-or-nothing about stopping all-or-nothing thinking. So one thing that I noticed with my clients is when they start to become aware of how often they exhibit all-or-nothing thinking. They start to notice those words in their heads. They forget to do that with compassion and they start to beat themselves up about it.
And they say, I always beat myself up. I'm someone who always does all-or-nothing thinking. Um, I'm never kind to myself. So they get a bit all-or-nothing about trying to address this stuff.
These are long habits. They are long habits that's reinforced by the society that we live in and the structures we went to school in and all of these other things. Let's not expect that you're going to listen to one, however long this is, podcast from me and go, oh, okay. I won't do all-or-nothing thinking anymore. That's not going to happen. I still do all or nothing thinking. The coaches that taught me still do all-or-nothing thinking. It still happens. It's fine. So remember, even when we are talking about all-or-nothing thinking, it's okay for there to be a paradox.
You can exhibit all-or-nothing thinking and not take it too seriously. You can notice that you're starting to do that again without making it mean that you are completely out of control of your brain and that it's all going to go wrong, and you've messed up coaching now.
Let's just notice it. Notice it with compassion, and then try and work through some of these steps where we just query it. Just pull it apart a little bit. Just make it a little bit less important, a little bit more ridiculous, and let's celebrate all of those partial successes. Thank you so much for listening, and see you next week.