Which cognitive distortions are commonly targeted in CBT for anxiety disorders?

• A. Catastrophizing and magnification
• B. All-or-nothing thinking and mind reading
• C. Personalization and emotional reasoning
• D. Fortune telling and labeling

Answer: (A)

In anxiety disorders, the thinking pattern that most sustains fear is the tendency to believe the threat will be catastrophic and to blow the threat out of proportion. Catastrophizing makes you imagine the worst possible outcome, while magnification pushes you to overstate how dangerous or consequential that outcome would be. These two distortions directly fuel anxious arousal and avoidance, so CBT focuses on them by helping you identify when you’re predicting disaster, assess the actual likelihood and impact, and test these predictions through behavioral experiments and thought records. Over time, you learn to replace extreme predictions with more balanced analyses, reducing fear and avoidance.

Other distortions can appear in anxious thinking, but they’re not as consistently central to the anxiety pattern. For example, all-or-nothing thinking or mind reading, personalization and emotional reasoning, or fortune telling and labeling may occur, but the core mechanism CBT targets for anxiety is the combination of predicting disaster and exaggerating its threat.