Magnification and Minimization

When it tends to show up

• When you make a small slip of the tongue in front of other people
• When someone asks about your strengths or what you’re good at
• When you compare someone else’s success with your own

A hint for another view

How big will this look to you a year from now? Try putting the magnifying glass down and looking at it at its actual size.

What is Magnification and Minimization

Magnification and Minimization is a habit of seeing your own mistakes and weak points as bigger than they really are, while seeing your strengths, your successes and what you do for others as smaller than they really are. The magnifying side is also often called "Catastrophizing." You could compare it to carrying a magnifying glass that stretches and shrinks: you hold the enlarging lens up to whatever worries you, and the shrinking lens up to whatever is good.

This habit can grow out of an attitude of trying to see yourself objectively, or out of a wish to take your mistakes seriously. Not brushing off your failures, and being able to feel grateful for other people's help, are lovely qualities too. But when your measuring stick tilts to be strict only with yourself, a small slip can look very serious, and you may become unable to name even one good thing about yourself. When that state goes on, you may feel down more easily.

There is nothing strange about having this habit. Everyone looks at themselves from too close up, so measuring the real size of things is surprisingly hard. Noticing "I might be using the magnifying glass right now" is the first step toward seeing things differently.

Everyday examples

At work, you might misread one number from a handout in a meeting. Hardly anyone else even noticed, yet you keep thinking for days, "I may have lost their trust." Meanwhile, the big deal you closed that same week gets treated as small: "It's just part of my job." The slip you made gets replayed many times, while the success gets mentioned once, if at all.

At school, when you are asked about your strengths while practicing for an interview or introducing yourself, you may answer "Nothing in particular." Even if people around you can see plenty of strengths, their value is hard for you to see yourself. Being a good listener, staying calm under pressure, or always remembering people's birthdays can all be real strengths, even if they don't feel impressive to you.

At home, even though you take care of chores and errands for your family every day, you may not count your own contribution, saying "Everybody does that," and instead dwell heavily on the occasional day you couldn't get to them. Three hundred days of cooking, laundry and school drop-offs can feel like nothing next to the one night you ordered takeout.

With friends or in dating, you can sincerely think "That's amazing" about a friend's success, yet feel "It's no big deal" when you do the same thing yourself. On social media, comparing your everyday life with other people's glamorous posts can make your own life look very small.

When it tends to get stronger

Magnification and Minimization tends to get stronger when you are in front of people or being evaluated. During a presentation, a job interview, or your first days at a new workplace, when you are conscious of other people's eyes, small slips and mistakes feel bigger than they really are.

It also shows up more when you have many chances to compare yourself with others. When you hear about people your age doing great things, or when everyone around you seems to be doing well, you tend to look at your own achievements through the shrinking lens. When you are tired or haven't slept enough, worries also tend to look bigger and good things smaller.

Questions that help you find another view

When you aren't sure how big something really is, try asking yourself questions like these:

• Looking back from a year from now, how big an event will this seem?
• How much do you think the people who were there will remember about this?
• If a friend made the same mistake, how seriously would you take it?
• Can you name three things you did for others, including small ones?
• Are you measuring other people's successes and your own with the same measuring stick?

Try putting the magnifying glass down and looking at things at their actual size. When you measure your mistakes and your strengths again with the same stick, the way they look can settle down a little.

How it differs from similar patterns

It is very similar to Disqualifying the Positive. Disqualifying the Positive is a habit of canceling out good things as "just luck" or "just being nice" and treating them as if they never happened. The difference is that Magnification and Minimization still admits that the good things exist while estimating them as small, and at the same time it makes failures bigger: it works in both directions, stretching and shrinking.

It can also overlap with All-or-Nothing Thinking. All-or-Nothing Thinking is a habit of sorting the whole thing into "perfect" or "failure" because of one gap. It becomes easier to tell them apart if you think of Magnification and Minimization not as splitting things into two choices, but as a habit where the way you measure the size of each event is off. A missed number in a meeting is neither "perfect" nor "failure"; it is simply measured as much bigger than it really is.