Picture this. You’ve finally been asked to give a presentation in front of your regional boss (and all your peers) the next time she comes into the office.

You’ve been working overtime to impress the higher-ups at your company and hopefully get that raise that will take you to the next financial level.

You write and revise your PowerPoint. You think of answers to frequently asked questions. You review the presentation over and over again until even your family can recite it by heart. You feel nervous but hopeful.

On the day of your presentation, you knock it out of the ballpark! At the end, 13 people, including the regional boss, tell you what an amazing job you did! Then comes your supervisor, Perfect Patty, with her criticism of the one thing she wishes you had done differently to put your presentation over the top.

So which sticks with you more?

• the compliments from thirteen people,
• or the supervisor’s comment about what you didn’t get “perfectly right”?

Mental Filtering

If you fixate on the one criticism, then you’re guilty of the cognitive distortion of mental filtering. Mental filtering occurs when you hyperfocus on the negative aspects of a situation and completely dismiss all the positives.

To understand how easily this happens, picture this…

When I was younger, I enjoyed baking. And on one occasion, I baked a strawberry cake. It turned out beautifully, and I decided that it wouldn’t be complete without some tasty frosting on top.

I bought a can of vanilla frosting and decided to use food coloring to get it to a nice light pink color. After emptying the can of frosting into a bowl, I poured a few drops of red food coloring into the bowl and began to stir.

Imagine my surprise when the frosting quickly went from white to strawberry! Just a few drops of food coloring were enough to change the entire can of frosting from white to red in the blink of an eye.

A Little Goes A Long Way

In the last article, I told you that emotional reasoning is what happens “when you make a feeling a fact that governs and dictates the way you think, the way you live your life, and the way you make decisions.“

With mental filtering, you’ve allowed one negative thing to color and distort your entire view of a situation or experience. So just as I miscalculated how many drops of food coloring were needed to get to light pink, thus ruining the effect I was going for, not getting a hold of your mental filtering will negatively affect the level of joy, happiness, or peace you have in any given situation.

Examples of Mental Filtering

If you’re still not sure what mental filtering looks like, here are a few examples:

• You go in for your performance evaluation. You get several scores in the ‘Exceeds Expectations’ range, but focus on the one area where your boss said ‘Meets Expectations.’
• You’ve caught the ball every time your teammate passed it to you. Yet the one time you missed it, you fixate on that failure.
• You play your first piano recital and accidentally play the wrong key near the end. While you played 95% of the piece flawlessly, and got a standing ovation, you focus on the 5% where you messed up.
• You do your makeup for the first time and get tons of compliments. Your sister points out that your bronzer wasn’t blended well, and you immediately start to feel down about your makeup.

With mental filtering, you've allowed one negative thing to color and distort your entire view of a situation or experience. Share on X

The Fix

So how do you kick mental filtering to the curb once and for all?

First, QUESTION: Learn to question your thoughts rather than treating them like instant facts.

Ask yourself:

• “What am I zooming in on right now?”
• “What evidence am I ignoring?”
• “Is one small thing overshadowing a whole success?”

Then remind yourself:

One negative detail doesn’t define the entire experience.

Intentionally redirect your attention to the whole picture — the 13 compliments, not the 1 critique.

Second, REFLECT: When you start to “feel” triggered, ask yourself, “Am I allowing mental filtering to skew my view of this situation?”

If when you tell a story you tend to zoom in on what went wrong, you’re probably mental filtering. Like a pair of dark sunglasses, focusing on the negative can darken your entire viewpoint.

Respond to it by saying:

“Nope. That’s mental filtering. I’m choosing to see the whole picture, not just the flaw.”

Like taking off dark sunglasses, the situation doesn’t change — your perspective does.

Third, CHANGE: Revise the narrative.

Don’t allow mental filtering to turn into overgeneralizing (another cognitive distortion). Don’t assume that in life, bad things will always affect your enjoyment of the good things. Remember, most situations will not be perfect. Plus, perfectionism only leads to anxiety.

Learn to:

• Celebrate what went well
• Learn from the negative without living in it
• Refuse to let one comment define your worth or performance

When you curb mental filtering, your view of yourself becomes clearer, more balanced, and more grounded in truth — not flaw hunting. Read the next one in this series here.

What are some times that mental filtering has kept you stuck? Which strategy will help you to quickly kick it to the curb?