Picture this: something goes wrong at work, a deadline gets missed, a project doesn’t land the way it should have. One person on the team goes quiet, takes the whole thing onto their own shoulders, and starts to withdraw. In their head, it was entirely their fault, and now they just want to disappear for a while rather than face anyone. The guilt is driving their need for isolation
Now picture someone else: a family member, maybe, who you’ve watched for years. Whenever something doesn’t go his way, it’s always someone else’s doing, or the situation, or bad luck, or the system. He’s rarely short of an explanation for why things happened, but somehow, none of those explanations ever lead anywhere. No new approach or change in choices but rather the same story on repeat.
Two very different people, two very different reactions. But underneath both is the same thing: a thinking trap. A fast, automatic, almost invisible way of interpreting a situation that decides how the rest of the response goes. This thinking trap happens before anyone has actually stopped to ask whether the interpretation was even true.
This is something psychologist Karen Reivich, along with her colleague Andrew Shatté, spent years studying. These are things that minds just do, especially the busy, tired and overstretched minds. They are definitely not signs of weakness or poor character! Once you can name a few of them, you start to notice them everywhere: in yourself, in people you manage, in people you love.
There are more of these traps than we’ll cover here, but let’s look at a handful of the ones that show up most often in working life.
Five traps worth knowing
Personalising, the “me” trap. This is exactly what was happening for the colleague in our first example. It’s the reflex to assume a problem is entirely our doing, even though other factors clearly played a part. It often shows up as guilt, and guilt has a habit of making people want to withdraw rather than reach out, which is usually the opposite of what would actually help.
Externalising, the “them” trap. The mirror image of personalising, and exactly what’s going on with the family member who always has someone or something else to blame. There’s often a kernel of truth in there. But when nothing is ever our own to own, there’s also nothing left for us to actually change. The story stays the same because nothing in it is within our control.
Magnifying, otherwise known as catastrophising. Taking a setback and mentally fast-forwarding it straight to the worst possible outcome. A slightly tense email becomes “I’m about to lose this client.” One piece of critical feedback becomes “they think I’m bad at my job.” I can certainly relate to this one! It’s horrible and quite unhelpful.
Mind Reading. Deciding we know exactly what someone else is thinking, almost always assuming the worst, without a shred of actual evidence. “They didn’t reply to my message, they must be annoyed with me.” Confident conclusion but made with zero data.
Overgeneralising. Turning one moment into a permanent pattern. “This always happens.” “Nothing I do works.” One missed deadline becomes proof of being generally unreliable, rather than just one missed deadline.
There are more of these (Reivich and Shatté describe eight in total in The Resilience Factor), but these five tend to do the most damage in working life, simply because work involves so many moments of ambiguity: an unclear message, an unexplained silence, a piece of feedback with no context attached. Thinking traps love ambiguity. They fill the gap fast, usually with the least accurate explanation available.
These thinking traps can show up at any time but far more easily on low days. When you’re running on empty, behind on things, or already stretched thin, your “A-game” thinking, measured, curious, willing to look for evidence, is the first thing to go. The traps step in to fill the gap, because they’re faster and require less mental energy than actually examining what’s true. This not a character flaw but rather how a tired mind conserves resources, by reaching for the quickest interpretation instead of the most accurate one.
The story we tell ourselves afterwards
Thinking traps are about the snap judgement in the moment. But psychologist Martin Seligman, researching around the same period, was looking at something related: the deeper story we tell ourselves once the moment has passed, what he called our explanatory style.
He found it tends to run along three dimensions, often called the three P’s:
Permanence: do we see the cause as lasting (“I’ll never get this right”) or temporary (“I’m finding this hard right now”)?
Pervasiveness: do we let it spread into a judgement about everything (“I’m useless”) or keep it contained to the specific situation (“I missed this one deadline”)?
Personalisation: do we attribute it entirely to ourselves, or recognise the role of outside factors too?
When someone consistently explains setbacks as permanent, pervasive, and entirely personal, they’re more vulnerable to a sense of helplessness, the belief that nothing they do will make a difference, so there’s little point trying. Think of our family member from earlier, but with the dial turned the other way: instead of blaming everyone else, everything becomes “this is just how things go for me.” Same lack of forward movement, opposite direction of blame.
Real-time skills for catching yourself
The useful part of this work is not only being able to identify the trap but also having something to do the moment you notice you’re in one. Reivich developed a set of real-time resilience skills for exactly this: quick, practical moves you can make in the middle of a stressful moment, often summarised by three sentence starters.
Evidence: “That’s not true because…” Pause and ask what’s actually true here. What evidence supports the thought, and what evidence contradicts it? This alone is often enough to loosen a trap’s grip, because most traps collapse the moment you look for proof.
Reframe: “A better way to think about this is…” Once you’ve tested the thought against the evidence, look for a more accurate and useful way to see the situation. You don’t need to find the most amazing positive reframe. Just find one that is more helpful and can help you focus your attention on the next step.
Plan: “If this happens, then I will…” Decide in advance how you’ll respond if the feared outcome actually does occur. A simple if-then plan takes a vague, looming worry and turns it into something concrete and manageable, which reduces its power over you.
These three moves work well together, and they work fast because thinking traps tend to show up in moments that don’t leave much room for slow reflection: a tense email, a missed reply, a comment in a meeting that didn’t sit right.
Why this matters more than it seems
None of this is about becoming relentlessly positive or pretending difficulties aren’t real. Reivich’s central point is that resilience isn’t about positive thinking. It’s about accurate thinking. The goal isn’t to feel better by ignoring what’s true. It’s to notice when your mind has swapped accuracy for speed, and to gently bring it back.
We all fall into these traps. The aim isn’t to never fall in. It’s to recognise it sooner, and to have a way out when you do.
Still Willows offers confidential mental wellness coaching for small teams, drawing on evidence-informed approaches like these to help people build genuine, sustainable resilience. If you’d like to talk about what that could look like for your team, we’d love to hear from you.
References
- Reivich, K., & Shatté, A. (2002). The Resilience Factor: 7 Essential Skills for Overcoming Life’s Inevitable Obstacles. Broadway Books.
- Reivich, K. (n.d.). Real-Time Resilience. U.S. Army Resilience Directorate. armyresilience.army.mil
- Seligman, M. E. P. (1991). Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. Knopf.
- Seligman, M. E. P. (1975). Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death. W. H. Freeman.