The other day, I found out that one of my close friends had an extra ticket to a football playoff game, and he invited another friend instead of me. Hurt by this apparent slight, I thought I must have done something to make my friend mad, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I also wondered if my friend thought I’d be a boring guest who’s not much fun to bring to a game. I wasn’t quite sure at first how to handle it, but eventually I decided to casually share what I’d heard the next time I saw him. He replied: ‘Yeah, I thought about asking you, but I know you don’t like football,’ which made me laugh – in part because it was true, but also because I had been so focused on what I believed this incident said about me that I overlooked a more likely explanation for his decision.

This example highlights two biased forms of thinking that involve taking things too personally. The first is personalisation, which is believing that you’re the cause of a negative event, despite having little or no evidence to support the belief. In my case, I thought I had missed out on an opportunity because I upset my friend, even though I had no idea what I had done. The second is mind reading, which is believing that someone is making a critical judgment about you, especially in an ambiguous situation where you’ve received no direct feedback. Again, in my case, I assumed that my friend thought I wouldn’t be fun to bring to a game, basing my belief solely on the fact that I wasn’t invited.

You can find examples of these beliefs in many ordinary experiences. Personalisation can emerge after any unwanted event but, for some, it stands out the most when other people are involved. Suppose you encountered a relatively minor social disappointment, like sharing a picture of friends online, only to find out later that one friend hates how they looked in that shot. In this situation, beating yourself up about it might highlight a personalisation bias (thinking it’s all your fault), particularly if your friend didn’t ask you to get their input before sharing photos.

Similarly, even the smallest interactions can drive a mind-reading bias. If you ask your server at a restaurant to explain exotic dishes or ingredients, you might imagine that they view you as pushy or uncultured. Or if you struggle to describe the details of your pet’s symptoms when you call the veterinarian, you might worry that they think you’re wasting their time. In these situations, it’s likely that the other person will actually have a certain amount of patience after numerous encounters with people who are unfamiliar with their job-specific jargon. But if you tend to take things personally, your attempts to make sense of their reactions could distort your sense of what’s actually happening.

There are several problems with these errors in thinking. The first, of course, is that they’re inaccurate, driven more by feelings, personal histories, ambiguity and conspicuously negative information than by objectivity. Another is that, if you commit to these biased beliefs, you limit your emotional options to feeling sad about your perceived flaws, anxious about your ability to withstand upcoming social challenges, or angry at others for not being nicer. Finally, they limit your behavioural options. If you accept these thoughts as facts, it can be hard to see past giving up, avoiding or lashing out. In short, these tendencies to take things too personally restrict your emotional and behavioural options and increase the likelihood that you’ll struggle with distress or dysfunction.

The importance of these cognitive biases was outlined by the psychiatrist Aaron T Beck, who emphasised in his cognitive model of depression the reciprocal relations among self-defeating, hopeless thoughts, feelings such as immense sadness, and passivity or withdrawal. The terms personalisation and mind reading were popularised by the psychiatrist David D Burns, who brought these concepts to a consumer audience in his classic self-help book, Feeling Good (1980).

Misleading thoughts about social situations can become habitual

Social situations are always somewhat unclear, so it’s natural to try to make sense of them. If you experience a social setback or can’t get a good read on what another person is thinking, being self-aware can help you pinpoint and correct social problems. But if you resort to personalising or mind reading whenever there’s a bit of social ambiguity, these well-rehearsed thoughts will start to appear automatically, even when you don’t have much evidence to suggest they’re true.

You can think of these automatic thoughts as learned behaviours, acquired through experience. They might be linked to a history of accepting responsibility for problems to take the pressure off others. Or if a friend, romantic partner, boss or parent repeatedly blamed you for problems you didn’t cause, you may have internalised their accusations and started to believe them. Such experiences can make personalisation or mind-reading errors your go-to thoughts whenever things aren’t going well. But that doesn’t mean they’re true. It just means that that’s where your mind goes.

If you struggle with taking things too personally, it’s likely that these self-critical thoughts have been rehearsed so often that you don’t even notice them anymore, particularly if you’re wrapped up in the uncomfortable feelings and urges that accompany them. You can compare these well-learned automatic thoughts to the procedural ones that help you perform activities you’ve done countless times, like driving a car.

Often, thoughts suggesting that a problem is your fault or that someone must be judging you negatively are compounded by other kinds of distorted thinking. You might not only treat an ambiguous behaviour as a personal slight but also tell yourself that it reflects a problem with you, one that will last forever and affect everything you do. Such explanations, which are personal, permanent and pervasive – the so-called ‘three Ps’ described by the psychologist Martin Seligman – often go together. If you strongly believe these thoughts, you limit your options for change or problem solving.

With practice, however, you can learn to be selective about the self-critical thoughts you take seriously and those you leave alone. Instead of always taking things personally and getting stuck, you’ll be able to consider and adopt more realistic beliefs about yourself and challenging social situations, make more useful plans to address problems or prepare for the future, and work through the difficult emotions that get in your way.

As a clinical psychologist specialising in cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) for anxiety and depression, I often work with clients who blame themselves excessively for social setbacks or assume the worst about other people’s judgments of them. With guidance, they learn to respond to their thoughts more flexibly, with a collection of useful strategies like the ones I’ll describe here. These methods for coping more effectively with personalisation and mind-reading biases have been helpful for many people, and I’m confident that, with regular practice, they’ll be useful to you, too.