Maybe That Lion’s Not a Lion: How Jumping to Conclusions Trips Us Up

In the opening pages of her book The Zookeeper’s Wife, author Diane Ackerman recalls a Polish folk story her grandfather passed down to her as a young girl:

“One of them tells of a village with a little circus whose lion had suddenly died. The circus director asked a poor old Jewish man if he would pretend to be the lion, and the man agreed since we needed the money. The director said: “All you have to do is wear the lion’s fur and sit in the cage, and people will believe you’re a lion.” And so the man did, muttering to himself, “What strange jobs I’ve had in my life,” when his thoughts were interrupted by a noise. He turned just in time to see another lion creeping into his cage and fixing him with a hungry stare. Trembling, cowering, not knowing how to save himself, the man did the only thing he could think of – vociferously chant a Hebrew prayer. No sooner had he uttered the first desperate words, Shema Yisroel (Hear O Isreal)… than the other lion joined in with adonai elohenu (the Lord our God), and the two would-be lions finished the prayer together.”

It’s easy to put yourself in the poor man’s shoes. You can almost imagine how quickly and aggressively his heart rate would have jumped, how suddenly his muscles would have tensed up, and how thoroughly that lion fur covering his body would have been drenched with a nervous sweat.

You can also imagine how his terror would have turned to relief when he realized that the hungry, vicious looking lion approaching him was really nothing more than a co-worker, the panic he felt moments earlier dissipating as the reality of the situation dawned on him.

You can’t blame him, really. It would take an incredibly brave (or incredibly clueless) person to stay cool and calm face-to-face with a hungry lion.

But as the twist at the end of the story reveals, it wasn’t actually a near death experience that caused all of the “trembling, cowering and not knowing how to save himself,” but his inaccurate interpretation of the situation.

Therapists often talk about cognitive distortions (also called “unhelpful thinking patterns” or “twisted thinking”). Cognitive distortions are a number of different automatic tricks our brains play on us that twist, distort or even invent information, leading us to inaccurate conclusions and interpretations of events.

Since our thoughts and feelings are inextricably linked, these distorted thoughts and inaccurate interpretations often lead to unnecessary feelings of anxiety, anger, depression or more.

One of these cognitive distortions is simply called jumping to conclusions. It refers to our brain’s tendency to – you guessed it – jump to negative conclusions based on limited information.

This happens in two ways: mind reading, where we believe that someone else is thinking negatively about us, and predictive thinking or “fortune-telling,” where we jump to a conclusion and convince ourselves that some negative event is going to happen in the future without having all the information we need to be sure.

We see this happening in the story. The poor old Jewish man jumps to the conclusion that he is going to be brunch based on the “hungry stare” of what he thought was a lion, without knowing that the circus owner had decided his audience might prefer to see two fake lions instead of just one.

It might sound simplistic. “Don’t jump to conclusions” has become so cliché that it’s easy to dismiss such advice and believe we aren’t susceptible to it. But the reality is we’re all prone to this thought pattern. When we don’t have all the information we need, our minds use past experiences, beliefs, biases and more to fill in the blanks. As a result, we draw conclusions and make predictions that may or may not be accurate, and lead us into unnecessary difficult emotions.

To make matters worse, we all have what’s called a negativity bias which leads us more often than not to gravitate towards potential negative conclusions.

You may see a friend squinting at you and assume she is judging how you look.

You may be convinced that you’ll be fired if you’re late for work.

You may think if you don’t stay up all night to study, you will fail your exam and be expelled.

You can see how easy it would be to feel depressed, anxious or stressed by any of these thoughts. “Your emotions follow your thoughts just as surely as baby ducks follow their mother,” says Dr. David D. Burns in his book Feeling Good. “But the fact that the baby ducks follow faithfully along doesn’t prove that the mother knows where she is going!”

The trick to breaking negative thought patterns to figure out whether the thoughts driving our feelings are accurate or distorted. One of the simplest and best ways to do this is to identify the distortion – simply being aware of this form of twisted thinking and our susceptibility to it makes it easier to spot and address.

Next, we need to weigh the evidence. Ask yourself what is the proof both for, and against, the conclusion. What evidence is there to suggest that the thought is right and what evidence is there to suggest that it may be wrong?

As you do this, you’ll begin to see there are always alternative possibilities at play:

Maybe your friend is judging your outfit or maybe she’s squinting because the sun is in her eyes.

Maybe your boss will be angry or maybe no one will notice when you walk in late.

Maybe you will fail, but maybe you will still pass that exam.

Maybe that lion’s not actually a lion.

When we develop this list of “maybes,” we’re reminding ourselves that we can’t predict the future, and whatever conclusions or assumptions we automatically come up with may or may not be true.

When we evaluate our thoughts and find alternatives, we take away the distorted conclusion’s power to suck us into anxiety, stress or depression.

Learning how to spot and then challenge distorted thoughts can be an incredibly helpful tool to both avoid and deal with anxiety, depression, stress and anger.