14. Overgeneralisation in Mindset, Fitness & Relationships (Mindset Mistakes #2)

Are you sabotaging your progress without even realizing it? In this episode of The Fitness With Jade Podcast, we dive deep into overgeneralisation, one of the most common cognitive distortions that affects your fitness, mindset, relationships, and business.

From missing a workout, struggling in a Pilates class, or feeling off-track with nutrition, your brain can take a single negative moment and turn it into a story that “everything is failing.” We unpack why this happens, how your brain is wired for survival rather than accuracy, and why it keeps you stuck in frustration, self-doubt, and overwhelm.

I share practical examples for training setbacks, business challenges, and daily life, plus strategies to stop overgeneralising, shift your mindset, and build consistent progress. Learn how to:

• Recognise the red-flag words like “always,” “never,” and “everything” in your self-talk
• Stop one bad workout, meal, or day from dictating your confidence
• Apply CBT-inspired swaps to your internal dialogue in fitness, life, and business
• Reframe setbacks, injuries, or slow business weeks as opportunities to grow

If you want to improve your fitness mindset, boost consistency, and stop letting cognitive distortions control your life, this episode is for you.

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for more mindset tips and fitness inspiration, and don’t forget to subscribe to The Fitness With Jade Podcast so you never miss an episode on self-improvement, personal growth, and wellness strategies.

✨ Mentioned in this episode:

• Rouvy - code JADE for FIVE free weeks!
• Body Science Supplements — use code BSCXJADE20 for 20% off

Transcript

 You are listening to The Fitness with Jade podcast, where I discuss all things wellness, fitness, and lifestyle, helping you to become that girl, the version of yourself you've always wanted to be. This is not just a fitness pod. It tackles all different facets of life. And today we are gonna be talking about.

Second cognitive distortion and that is overgeneralization. So if you haven't already, make sure you check out the first distortion that I discuss in depth, which is all or nothing thinking around two episodes ago. And yeah, it's quite a good one. So make sure you check that out. Now, what is overgeneralization and why does it matter?

So picture this, you miss your appointment and tell yourself, oh, I always do this. Does that sound familiar? So today we're gonna be unpacking why your brain does that and how to learn to recognize when it does do it so that you can completely change how you see yourself and how you react to certain situations.

Now I just go back from Bali and I, I gotta say the weather here, it's supposed to be nearly summer and the spring. The weather here is abysmal and I'm very much over it. But before we begin, I'm gonna give a quick shout out to the sponsors. So we've got Ruby, who are indoor cycling. They have all the Ironman 70.3 and full Ironman courses on their program, which is extremely useful for those that are doing triathlon.

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Sign up to Ruby. So if you wanna do that, make sure you check it out and then lift a link for them in the description. I also need proper fueling both pre and post-race and body science. Supplements are a game changer for me. I usually am extremely picky with my protein powders and bars, but I love their high protein vanilla blend and their MO star bars.

And one of my new favorites is actually their mellow bars too. So shop@bodyscience.com au and use the discount. B-S-C-X-J-A-D-E 20 for 20% of all products. I left a link and code in the description box as well. So over generalization, what is it, and I guess the best way to describe this would be to kind of paint an example.

So it's a single failure seen as a predictor of future failures. That's essentially what. Overgeneralization is. So an example of this is you go into a job interview and you thought you smashed it. You thought you absolutely annihilated it, and then you end up finding out that you didn't get the job. So from that, you then deduce that all future job interviews, you've already failed because you aren't ever gonna get a job.

And that is the overgeneralization kind of stepping in. And I guess a key word that was used within that sentence is. You'll never, ever get a job at any sentence where there's always, never, everyone usually is lending itself to a cognitive distortion, and overgeneralization is the key one in this scenario.

It's like when you're driving home and you hit one red light and then you're assuming every single light from now on will be red. So then you start getting angry about it and have this negative mindset and you forget that the stop was just a one off, which is a temporary one, and it's not the world working against you.

Another good example would be gonna a Pilates class. And you are like really struggling to do the Pilates class and then you just decide you'll never be this Pilates princess. But I guess the, the thing you really need to look at is that every single person who's tried Pilates before has wobbled or, you know, stuffed up in their first class too, and even their second class, third, fourth, or whatever.

People are gonna make mistakes. And if they just use that mistake and then use that to predict the future as like, I'm always gonna be stuffing this up. It means that they would never actually move forward and they never grow, they never learn, and they never take new opportunities. All right, let's break down what over generalization actually means.

Because we all do it or we all have done it, and half the time we don't even realize it's happening. And that is the problem with these cognitive distortions, and that's why it's basically just ruining your life. So let's stop this and let's. Figure this out together. So overgeneralization is where your brain takes one single event, usually something negative or emotionally charged, and then it stretches this across everything.

It's like, oh, now everything's fucked. So it's when one bad workout, one argument, one rejection happens, and your brain instantly just. This always happens. I can never get this right. Nothing works for me. They always do this. It's the brain's way of simplifying information, but it oversimplifies so much that it actually stops being true, and it's basically a really bad habit of thinking in extremes where one little thing becomes the whole story.

And do you wanna know what it happens? I'll tell you. So your brain is wide for survival in you back in the day when when were cavemen, and even though it's wide for survival, it doesn't actually mean it's accurate because when we're in the animal kingdom, your brain's number one job was to just keep you alive.

Yeah, just to survive, not to die, you know, optimal. It wasn't made to keep you happy, it wasn't made to make you feel confident. It was just literally there. To keep you alive. So let's say you're a hunter gatherer. Thousands of years ago, you're picking your berries and you're spearing your buffalo or whatever.

So you're walking through the forest and you get chased by a tiger. That's a huge emotional event. So your brain doesn't want you to ever experience that again. So the next time you even hear rustling in the bushes, it tells you don't go near that. It's a tiger. It's gonna eat you and like beat you to pieces.

Like your head's gonna go that way and your legs gonna go that way. The brain takes this one experience. The tiger and makes a rule for everything that's similar. And so everything in the future that you hear or feel, uh, so rustling because of the threat, or if you're alone, you're unsafe, or if there's movements in the bushes, you run, anything that kind of reminds you of that event, your brain automatically tells you it's bad, it's gonna happen again.

You are, you're screwed. You're gonna get eaten by this target if you don't do X, Y, and z. It's essentially just an emotional shortcut meant to keep you safe, but in the modern world, because you know we are not. Running away from tigers and we are not hunter gathering. It keeps you stuck because then when this one moment becomes your everything, you stop seeing your progress and you stop seeing the nuance in things too.

Because you are equating everything to a tiger. You're no longer responding to an actual situation. You are responding to this story that your brain is created about it. It's fictional, it's not real. Can usually spot over the generalization in yourself. Talk by the words that you use. So like I mentioned before, if you're always using, if you're always, if you're always using words such as always, never everyone or nothing, they kind of red flag words.

So I guess here are a few examples. I will always fall off my training. I never get any support, nothing I do works. Everything is always awful. The truth is no one always fails. Nothing never works. But when you're in this emotional state, the brain exaggerates what's happening to make sense of this pain, to make sense of the tiger, essentially.

So it's trying to find control in something that, in that moment felt uncontrollable. No, I guess you're thinking, girl, like obviously this is made to try and protect you. Why is this a negative thing? And the problem is when you live in these exaggerated thoughts, you then stop seeing yourself the way you actually are.

You start seeing yourself through the lens of your worst moments instead of the actual full story. You miss all the moments that did go right and all the effort that is actually building this momentum quietly behind the scenes, like the atomic habits, that kind of thing. You know, that book, that kind of thing.

You're missing those little. Building blocks. It shrinks your world and makes you feel powerless. And even though it gives you the illusion of being in control, it makes everything out of control, if that makes sense. So it is actually just a thinking pattern, and the second you recognize it, you can interrupt it and kind of short circuit it.

So next time we hear yourself saying the words always or never try and pause and ask yourself, is this actually true? Am I just hurt, tired, frustrated, angry? Right now, usually it's not that everything's actually stuffed, it's just this moment. And when you shift this awareness, when you actually pause and think about what you are thinking about, instead of thinking everything's wrong, change it to kind of like, this feels hard now.

And then that's how you start changing these distortions. So let's go over some specific examples so that you can figure out where you are using overgeneralization in your life. Uh, we'll start off with fitness 'cause you, this is a Fitness with Jade podcast, so let's talk about how it shows up in training because it actually is one of the most common mindset traps I see.

And it's usually what makes people quit when they're actually making progress. Overgeneralization in fitness is when you take one bad workout or one skip session, or just one setback during a workout and make it mean something about your entire ability or identity. So you probably said it before or at least thought it like, I'm so unfit right now.

I'm so fat right now. I've fallen off the wagon. I'm back at square one. I'll never be good enough. Okay. And that's the brain's shortcut. It takes this single data point and then stretches it into the whole story, and it's really not really, really. So say you've missed one training session and you, it might be 'cause you're tired, you work around late, or just something in life happened and then instead of seeing it's just one skip day, you are like, here we go again.

I always do this. I'm never gonna get, stay consistent. What's the point? Even going. What's the point of continuing? Now you've taken one neutral event, literally just missing one workout because of a legitimate reason and made it mean something about who you are. And that's when your motivation starts falling off.

That's when it starts collapsing because you literally believe, I can't do this, so why should I Keep trying. But consistency isn't perfect. It just means that you're showing up when you can and as much as you can, and it's built on recovering quickly. When you miss a session or when you miss a moment, instead of just letting everything fall to pieces, the people who succeed in training aren't the ones who never miss a session.

Every single person has missed a session at some point in their life, or they've changed up a session and they've changed it. They're the ones who miss one session and don't let it snowball. They just. Continue on with their life. The key is to stop labeling a single action as a pattern. One missed workout is just a blip.

You'll forget about it. It won't matter the story you tell yourself about it. That's actually what decides whether you bounce back or you just fall off completely. There's other ways it kind of shows up in your training and fitness. So I guess we all have days where the body just doesn't respond. Like your legs feel heavy, your strength's not there.

Or mentally you just can't be bothered. You just don't want to do it. So instead of saying, today I felt a little bit off, your brain goes, I've lost all my progress. I'm not improving. I am terrible at this. And that's an overgeneralization. So one bad day. Just because your legs felt heavy on a run, so your pace went down, isn't becoming, I can't run very well, or running, isn't working for me, or I'm not becoming a better runner.

And the reason this just is not true, because training is not linear. Your progress is not linear. You'll have days where your body is flat because you're tired, hormonal, stressed, under fueled. The list goes on, and that's normal. If you zoom out, your performance is always ebbing and flowing, and it's supposed to, it's never going to be consistently going up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up.

So imagine if you tracked every single session, you would see these highs and lows, but over time the trend is gradually moving up. It's just not this straight. Rigid line. So overgeneralization zooms in so tightly that this one low point makes you feel like it's just dropping and it's just, you know, sinking down to Mariana's Trench.

Okay, you're human. Remind yourself of that you're not a robot, and then just move on and go to your next. Another way this kinda shows up in your training, like I said, like one, um, overgeneralization could be like, I'm getting fat, you know, et cetera. So food and nutrition is a big one, I think, for everyone.

So if you eat something off plan or you have this high calorie meal, or you splurge on something like really fatty, your self-talk kicks in and you think, I've ruined my day. I'm off track. I have no willpower, I'm a fat lard. The list goes on. So that's overgeneralization again, turning one meal into a failure, one meal into, I must be obese, but think logically, can one meal really undo a week's worth of structure?

And that's no. If that one meal becomes every single meal, then yes, yes it will. But your progress, again, isn't built from one. Day. It's built through thousands of decisions over time. So when you start seeing food choices through that lens, it becomes more freeing too. So it allows you to kind of eat the foods that you want, but just don't overdo it.

When you think in an overgeneralized way, that's when you start eating out of guilt. Instead of eating out of intention, 'cause you think I'm off track, I'm fat lard, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then you just think, well, screw it. I'm just gonna eat whatever I want. And then you start picking up those bad habits instead of.

Implementing the good ones. Then you have comparing yourself with your progress with others. So you see someone else hitting these amazing records, these amazing run times, or they look like really shredded and, and their body's just like on point and you instantly think, I'll never be able to do that, or I'll never look like that, or, you know, I'm not good enough.

So you take this one again, observation, and then you stretch it to make it personal, to mean that you are not capable, but you don't know actually what they had to do to get to that stage. You're seeing this tiny little snippet without actually seeing what they've done or the work they've done. To get to that point.

So when you're comparing yourself without actually looking, you're just looking at the final result instead of seeing all the work that they've done. And it's just immediately making you stop, celebrate your wins. 'cause you've decided they haven't counted because you've literally just seeing this Instagram image or story.

Of someone who you think is doing better or looking better than you. So you know, we don't want that. Stop doing that. And then, and final way it kinda shows up in training is through injury or setbacks. So you get injured, you have to pull back on your training, and your brain just goes, I'm gonna lose everything.

I'll never get back to where I was. And again, this is a protective mechanism. Your brain is trying to brace you for disappointment. So then it over generalizes the setback. But the truth is most athletes do come back. Albeit even stronger after they have injuries because they're forced to rebuild smarter and pay attention to what they're doing and refining their formal habit.

So you can either view it as a setback as the end of your story, or you can just see it as a new chapter within it. The only thing that decides which one it becomes is literally how you talk to yourself in your head. So let's switch it up. Now. Let's look at overgeneralization through life and business examples.

And so let's look at content creators, business owners, people that have clients, or if you're even doing kinda like personal growth, whichever space you are in. Just say for example, you post for a week and you get no traction and your brain immediately jumps to you, nothing's working. I'm not growing.

People don't care. Like people don't care what I have to say. And that's overgeneralization. Your brain taking a small set of data, maybe a very slow week of engagement and turning into a full blown conclusion that your business is failing or your potential is nothing, but maybe your content is improving.

Maybe you're learning what resonates. Maybe you just need more time for the algorithm to catch up. 'cause growth is never instant. It's when your brain wants proof of the success but doesn't see it. Right away. And then it starts to fill in the blanks and it starts making you feel negative. And then by that point you're like, Ugh, I don't even wanna do this Instagram thing.

Let's just get rid of it. Another way it kind of peaks its ugly head is I'm bad with money. So if you're in life or in business, if you literally think in your head you're bad with money, you're gonna be bad with. And it's because you maybe me made one mistake or you've made like a business decision that just didn't land.

You know, you then start overgeneralizing and saying, I'll never get ahead. I can't handle my finances. That was so stupid. Like, I'm just gonna lose everything. And it's, again, turning a moment into an identity. You've made a small mistake. If it was a friend and they did the same, they made a mistake with money, you wouldn't label them financially hopeless forever.

You tell them, oh, it happens. So tell yourself the same. Then there's also just feeling overwhelmed, like ridiculously overwhelmed, and again, this is in life and in business. So you've had a chaotic day. Maybe the house is really messy, the kids are wild, and your schedule's packed, and then suddenly the story becomes, I can't do this.

This is too much. My life's a mess. I'm not good enough. But then is everything too much or is today just a lot? You really gotta like step back and think about the moment. And that's how a lot of people I feel like get stuck in burnout because they think that this one bad day is permanent and it kind of stretches like they make this bad day turn into a long-term reality and they should be doing the opposite.

That's what we don't want to do. That, and then as obviously as well as business, it can show up within relationships. So you can start questioning your own self worth, disguising it through logic as fact. So when you're already downing yourself, every negative piece of evidence feels like proof. So if you're doing something.

For a partner and you feel like they didn't like what you've done, you could then think, oh, see, that didn't work. I'm not good enough. I'm really not enough. And the truth is both the time, it's actually not about you. Just so just say your partner is upset, it's not necessarily about you, and it doesn't necessarily reflect you as a person.

So again, you are using individual moments as evidence against yourself and emotional, mature people. Usually you can say, that didn't land. I'm not gonna spiral. Let's try something new. And I really do feel like cognitive distortions in relationships are a massive, massive problem. Well, they're obviously a problem in all facets, especially over generalization.

So when, here's a few examples again, in terms of relationships. So one. Argument equals we always fight. One forgotten task is you never think about me. One bad mood is this relationship isn't working. And it feels true in the moment 'cause you're emotional, but it's not actually your reality. It's your brain trying to protect you by jumping to patterns that sounds safer than sitting with uncertainty.

And it hurts your relationship because it puts your partner on the defense immediately. It shuts down any nuance. So the part we can actually understand each other, it turns normal human mistakes into proof that there's something wrong when, you know, people, like I said, are not robots, and it reinforces insecure attachment patterns every single time it's repeated.

And I went over the anxiously attached and the avoidantly attached in a previous episode. So yeah, go have a listen to that, but we do not want to be reinforcing these attachment patterns. We don't want it. Let's start going over how we can challenge these cognitive distortions and we'll start with relationships 'cause we ended with the relationships.

So usually swaps these will help you. So instead of saying you never swap it, for right now, I'm feeling and I notice this one thing swap. You always, it feels like a pattern to me in this moment, but I know it might not be swap. This proves you don't care. I'm scared. This means you don't care. Help me understand.

Another one, which is just a simple reset phrase for all of your cognitive distortions would be, let me check the facts. Is this a one-off or an ongoing pattern? So something to tell yourself, and you'll be shocked at how often it's actually just a one-off and it shows up, especially with anxious attachment where you can show up and.

Any of the insecure attachment styles, your nervous system scans for danger. So then this one uncomfortable moment can feel huge 'cause it triggers these old fears and wounds. So rejection, abandonment, not being considered, and then overgeneralization gives your brain the illusion of certainty. So then you don't have to sit with that fear.

So what actually improves the relationship? Obviously taking situations one moment at a time. Being specific. Instead of making sweeping statements, naming your emotion, instead of accusing, leaving space for your partner to explain, which is something I struggle with, like blah, blah. I like word vomit. And then also checking the evidence before reacting.

So it just being like, you did this with actually knowing, calm your farm. Check things, things first. So those are super helpful. Well, I think they're, anyway. And then also, let's go over then business and life. So swap these thought. My business is obviously slowing down. You change that to this week is slow.

What can I adjust? Everyone hated that post. Then you change that to engagement dipped on that one. Why? What can I test next? And then I always stuff up. I didn't get it this time. What's the next small steps? And what actually improves things in business and life. So tracking your data weekly instead of guessing, looking at trends, not moods, making decisions from strategy, not anxiety.

Learning from one-offs instead of catastrophizing. And then staying consistent long enough to see, to see real patterns. And when you slow down the reaction, your business will then start to grow faster and your life will start to get easier. And then how to fix overgeneralization in fitness and training.

So shift the language. So I'm losing fitness. Today's run felt heavy. That's normal. In a training block. I always fall off track. I've had one off day, I'm back on tomorrow. This workout was terrible. That was a lower day. They all serve a purpose. And then what actually improved your training? So looking at the blocks, not individual sessions, expecting fluctuations instead of reacting to them.

Use objective markers. So pace, strength, volume. Taking emotion out of individual days and staying consistent even when you just feel mad. Like I said, progress isn't linear and people who get results aren't the ones who never stop. They just keep being consistent. Challenge the evidence. I bomb that workout, but what about the other 20 solid sessions this month?

So do that in all facets. Challenge it, and I think I'll even start on, make little cheat sheet for, you know, swaps. For your internal monologue and then challenges you can do as well. It's very like CBT 'cause we wanna fix it and we wanna stop overgeneralizing. Well, I certainly do Anyway, so that's all for this episode today.

If you have any questions or comments, please comment below in the podcast and make sure you're following me on Instagram at Jade. Palmer, I hope you've had a really good day and I'm excited to continue doing these cognitive distortions with you 'cause I think that they're really, really helpful. If you do too, please let me know and maybe if you even wanna tell me which one you wanna hear next, I'm all ears.

Until then, bye.