Cognitive inflexibility is usually not a global way of thinking, rather it tends to be specific to certain domains such as strict internal rules around fitness or health only, explains Archinal-Hudson.
Still, Pepper says, the impact of rigid thinking can be far-reaching – making social interactions challenging, limiting problem-solving ability, increasing difficulty with change and disrupting daily functioning.
“Inflexible, negative thinking and limiting beliefs can stop people from being happy and cause stress, anxiety and depression,” she says.
‘In my head, it was live or die’
When Varsha Yajman turned 16, her mother took her on a three-day cruise to celebrate. Rather than relish the experience, Varsha spent her time rigidly obsessing over the calories in the food and exercising compulsively. She remembers crying over ice-cream.
“Instead of being grateful for the cruise, I was just miserable,” says Varsha, who is now 23 and working in climate justice in Sydney.
She hadn’t been diagnosed at the time, but Varsha was struggling with an eating disorder, and living by a set of rigid, self-imposed rules that controlled almost every part of her day.
Rigid thinking often develops alongside a strict set of rules, which can lead to disordered eating.Credit: iStock
“In my head, it was like, ‘live or die’. If I wasn’t careful with food and disciplined about moving my body, I thought I’d be letting myself down.”
Varsha’s rigid thought patterns around food became linked to her academic performance.
“In year 12, I was desperate to get a good ATAR and get into university. I reached a point where I was like ‘if I lose X number of marks, I can’t eat this much’. Everything became a calculation – if this happened, then I have to do that,” she says.
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But she could never satisfy the rules she’d created.
“Regardless of the number or the scale or the marks I got, I would rationalise it as either ‘what you’re doing is working and you should keep going’, or ‘what you’re doing isn’t working and you need to try harder’.”
Traits of a rigid thinker
Archinal-Hudson says rigid thinkers are more prone to cognitive distortions, also called thinking errors or cognitive biases.
“These are automatic patterns of thought that can distort how we see ourselves and the world around us so you don’t consider the situation holistically,” she says.
She lists common examples as mind reading (assuming you know what someone else is thinking), catastrophising (jumping to the worst possible outcome), mental filtering (filtering in things that confirm your assumptions and filtering out those that don’t), and black-and-white thinking (seeing things as all good or all bad, success or failure).
‘My brain is trying to make sense of something’
Melbourne-based Katrina Shaw, 31, says rigid thought patterns began affecting her following the death of her mum when she was a teenager.
“From that trauma, I think my brain has learned that control means safety, control means predictability, so I have developed very fixed, high expectations of what control or certainty is,” Shaw says.
“It feels like my brain is trying to make sense of something when it’s unpredictable.
“I can sometimes feel my anxiety increasing, my mind is racing, I can’t really switch it off – it’s almost like a protective instinct.”
Shaw believes her inflexibility and need for perfection has held her back career-wise.
“A lot of my rigid thinking is around achievement – I’m self-employed, and like things to look and feel perfect, and have a very fixed perception of what that should be. If I don’t achieve it, I feel like I’ve failed, so often won’t try new things to avoid that.”
It also caused her significant distress when trying to start a family.
“We had recurrent miscarriages and ended up turning to IVF,” she says.
“I was trying to do everything I could to control the situation. I was doing everything social media tells me to do, everything books tell me to do and being very rigid on what I can and can’t do.
“When I miscarried, I blamed myself, and would ruminate on what I must have done that caused it.”
Control takes a toll
Being rigidly committed to your way of thinking can cause tension in relationships as well as burnout from trying to control everything, Pepper says.
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“Friends and family might feel like they are walking on eggshells, and while it might feel like a sense of control short term, over time it creates loneliness and exhaustion,” she says.
Varsha believes her rigid commitment to her rules robbed her of her personality.
“Mentally and physically, it just drained me,” she says. “I was a teenager and hormonal, but the person all the stress of food and perfectionism had made me was not a very nice person.”
Varsha says she has developed coping mechanisms to keep rigid thinking at bay.Credit: Sam Mooy
Ways to bend unyielding thoughts
The good news is, rigid thinking isn’t set in stone.
“It shouldn’t be seen as something that can’t change,” Archinal-Hudson says. “It can definitely improve through therapeutic support.”
Cognitive behaviour therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, and schema therapy, along with emotional regulation tools to self-soothe and re-regulate when distressed can help people develop new, adaptive beliefs.
Pepper says hypnotherapy may also help.
“Hypnosis can be helpful to get the mind to feel safer and more flexible,” she says. “In trance, the nervous system calms and the brain becomes more open to suggestions and new ways of responding.”
Shaw says seeing a psychologist helped her notice the unhelpful thoughts driving her anxiety – and taught her how to reframe and challenge them.
“I don’t think I would have become as aware of it without their help,” she says. “Five years ago, if my husband had challenged me when I was having a black-and-white thought process, I probably would have got really frustrated at him.
“Now I don’t mind people challenging it because I have the awareness and I know it’s just my brain trying to keep me safe. I can have a bit more compassion towards other people’s reactions as well as my own.”
Varsha has also been able to become more conscious of her unhelpful, rigid thinking patterns through therapy.
“It helped me see how much damage I had done mentally from being so success driven,” she says.
“It’s still something I have to be aware of – whenever there are stressors or changes in my life, I tend to struggle.
“But when I do hit those low points, I’m starting to see how far I’ve come and can now lean into other coping tools – like my friends, family, people who love me. Journaling helps a lot too.”
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