Cognitive Distortions
Your performance is either perfect or it is a complete failure.
All-or-nothing thinking.
This high-risk situation happens during a period of recovery. You may decide to use once just to see if you are able to stop or put yourself in a tempting situation.
Testing personal control
You downplay the importance of your accomplishments or downplay the significance of a situation.
Minimizing
This high-risk situation sometimes occurs when you are feeling good and want to feel even better. You might use to increase feelings of pleasure, freedom, or sexual excitement. It is often connected to special events like a birthday, holiday, or vacation. It can be tempting to make a special exception and give yourself permission “just this one time.”
Enhancement of positive emotions
You exaggerate the implications of a set-back or mistake.
Catastrophizing
This high-risk situation stems from having difficulty with another person, such as a friend, family member, or co-worker. You might experience feelings like frustration, jealousy, or anger stemming from an argument, disagreement, or a fight. This category also includes other emotions that are directly connected to an interaction with another person, such as anxiety, tension, worry, concern, or fear.
Coping with Conflict
You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it.
Mental Filter
This high-risk situation sometimes occurs when you are feeling emotionally upset and you want to use drugs/alcohol to change the way you are feeling. You may want to use to cope with fear, frustration, anger, sadness, anxiety, tension, boredom, depression, loneliness, or guilt.
Negative emotions
You make assumptions about what someone else is thinking or you anticipate that things will turn out badly, convince yourself that they will, and act accordingly.
Jumping to conclusions (Mind-reading/Fortune-telling.
This high-risk situation sometimes occurs because of difficulty dealing with unpleasant physical states and you want to use drugs/alcohol to change the way you feel physically. These physical states could be associated with prior drug/alcohol use, like feeling shaky and sick, or having difficulty sleeping. Other physical states are independent of previous substance use, such as pain, illness, injury, fatigue, or headache.
Negative physical/physiological states