The Emotional Resilience course (which every Latter-day Saint should take) includes a week on "Healthy Thinking Patterns" that can have profound implications for establishing Zion.
Here's the outline:
Emotional Values and Skills
1. Our Thoughts Influence Our Emotions
2. Recognizing Inaccurate Thinking Patterns
3. Responding to Triggers
4. Creating More Accurate Thinking Patterns
5. Changing Our Thinking Takes Practice
The manual provides a list of "common inaccurate thinking patterns" that are not only common in the world. They are ubiquitous.
The manual gives examples of how these thinking patterns affect our self-image, but these thinking patterns dominate the way people see the world and how we relate to one another, not only with interpersonal relationships, but also in politics, religion, science, economics, psychology, and other aspects of life.
Recognizing and correcting these thinking errors will enable Latter-day Saints to establish the Zion that everyone in the world is looking for. They just don't know where to find it.
11 And also it is an imperative duty that we owe to all the rising generation, and to all the pure in heart—
12 For there are many yet on the earth among all sects, parties, and denominations, who are blinded by the subtle craftiness of men, whereby they lie in wait to deceive, and who are only kept from the truth because they know not where to find it—
13 Therefore, that we should waste and wear out our lives in bringing to light all the hidden things of darkness, wherein we know them; and they are truly manifest from heaven—
14 These should then be attended to with great earnestness.
(Doctrine and Covenants 123:11–14)
The course includes awesome techniques for evaluating these errors and offers a system for us to either believe the thinking error or create more accurate thoughts.
Thinking Patterns | Explanation | Example |
|---|---|---|
All or Nothing | Seeing something or someone as all good or all bad. Look for phrases with words like always and never. | “I always say the wrong thing.” |
Mislabeling | Taking something that happened and making a broad or incorrect statement. | “The relationship ended, so I’m not good enough.” |
Jumping to Conclusions | Interpreting others’ thoughts or assuming the worst possible outcome. | “I bet everyone is laughing at me.” |
Personalizing | Blaming yourself or someone else for a situation that in reality involved many factors. | “They didn’t call me back, so they must be mad at me.” |
Emotional Reasoning | Judging a situation based on how you feel. | “I feel guilty. I must have done something bad.” |
Overgeneralization | Applying one experience and generalizing it to all experiences. | “I did poorly on this assignment, so why should I stay in the class?” |
Negative Mental Filter | Focusing on a negative detail and dwelling on it. | “It feels like nothing went well today. It was just failure after failure.” |
Discounting the Positive | Rejecting all positive experiences because you don’t feel like they count. | “It doesn’t matter if my daughter ate breakfast. She threw so many tantrums throughout the rest of the day!” |
Magnification | Exaggerating your weaknesses or comparing them to others’ strengths. | “I barely cook dinner for my family, and when I do, it’s nothing like her dinners.” |
“Should” Statements | Telling yourself how things should or should not be. | “I shouldn’t have messed up like that.” |