Omar Suleiman – Falling Into Your Thoughts

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smilla rahmanir rahim al hamdu Lillahi Rabbil alameen wa Salatu was Salam ala rasulillah Karim wa. In this mini little series, I'm going to talk about what's known as cognitive distortions. So these are basically flawed thinking patterns that we may have during this time of the Coronavirus. And it's a great time for us to reflect and see if any of these distortions are affecting our daily lives. So basically, we are going to be thinking about thinking, what are some cognitive distortions or ways of thinking which are not positive or healthy for us to have. The first one I want to cover is something known as all or nothing thinking. So an example of this is that, let's say you're on a

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diet, and you have, you know, a little cheat meal or you have a few chips, which you weren't supposed to eat. And let's say you were on this diet for six months. Now you feel like, Oh, I didn't accomplish anything. It's like, either I'm 100% on the diet, or I get nothing. And then what happens, we get discouraged. And we start to not want to continue our goal. I work with a lot of clients in substance abuse. And I had a client one time he had a relapse, which is not uncommon in recovery. It was a small amount. But what we try to do is say, look that happened, but for the last six months, or eight months or nine months, you've been sober. Let's not just discount that. And

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just say no, it's either all or nothing. I'm never going to make a mistake. And this is crucial with our relationship to a loss of Hannibal dollar. You know, Allah subhanho wa Taala said, or the Prophet sallallahu Sallam said, we'll let enough CBD low limb to niebo lava lava can

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be a common use in a boon for yourself. Iran aloha for your federal loan, is a very powerful Hadith. The Prophet sallallahu Sallam said that by him in whose hand my soul is, which is a statement that was used to basically swear an oath. He said, Allah is saying that if we did not commit sins, Allah would remove us and come with a group of people who did make mistakes. And they would seek forgiveness and Allah subhana wa Taala would forgive them. Why would Allah remove a group that's not making any mistakes? Because those are angels, right? Leia asuna, la Hama Amaro Maya, Luna, maroon, Allah says that they do the angels, they do what they're told, and they don't disobey Allah subhana

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wa Taala. We are not angels. So we should not have just all or nothing thinking. Islam is a process. It didn't come from perfect people that came for imperfect people. So when we mess up or make a mistake, we make us default. But if we've really been going good on something for a while, we don't want to fall into all or nothing thinking and just completely disregard any good that may have come before. The second is what's known as over generalization. So we will use words like always, or never. And especially during this time, you know, someone may say, you know what, I never get a good job. Or, I'm always second best in anything I do. Or people and and this is really, especially as

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we're spending time together as a family, people may start to get a little annoyed with each other and say things like, you never do this, when I asked you to do it. Think about this, never, that's a very strong word. Has this person really never done anything for you, or you've never had something that was positive in your life? This is flawed thinking and when we'll look at it and analyze it as we're doing now we'll see that it simply is not true. And really, it is a sign of not being grateful to Allah subhana wa Taala is just discounting the blessings He's given us, and that can lead to a bad opinion of Allah. And that's why the Prophet sallallahu Sallam said in a hadith would say, that

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Ananda runnning Abitibi that Allah is saying, I am in the opinion of my servant. So if we have a positive opinion of Allah subhanho wa Taala. That's how we're going to find him. And if we have a negative opinion, then that's what we're going to find. So we want to distance ourselves from this overgeneralization using words like always, or never, and think about it to remove these distortions. The last one I'll cover in this video is what's known as a mental filter. A mental filter is when we take an incident that happened, and we disregard any positive that came from it and only focus on a negative thing. So, for example, let's say you had a presentation, and there's

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10 people watching nine of them said you did a wonderful job.

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Maybe one of them said, you didn't do as wonderful a job as the other nine said, we will sit and we will focus on that one negative comment, and we will ignore all of the other positive things. This is unhealthy. This makes us anxious. This is very stressful. When the vast majority are telling you you're doing something good, then, you know, focus on that take the constructive criticism, but that's not the dominant factor. And we can also flip it right? If we have nine out of 10 telling us to do a terrible job, and one is telling us we did good, we want to use that to grow. There's a DA that I encourage all of us to read, which is Robbie hubballi hoekman one happening a sleight of hand

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underline the Quran, where the doctor is saying Oh Allah grant me wisdom and literally attach me with righteous people. Attach me with people who are close to Allah subhana wa, Tada. How does that relate to having a mental filter? You see, righteous people do a lot of things for us. They make us closer to Allah subhana wa Tada. They make us love our religion. They make us want to do good deeds, but they also are uplifting people. They're optimistic people. They're not always bringing us down. You know, what we call toxic people, toxic people take this mental mental filter, and they always focus on the negative. So they will tell you, you know, negative things about your friends or your

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job. And they won't look at the whole picture because of this distorted way of thinking. So these are three of the distortions that I wanted to cover. In Chatelet. This will get us thinking about thinking and we'll continue in the next video. Does that come along later? or something along while I say that Mr. Herman