Overgeneralization: How ‘Always’ and ‘Never’ Sabotage the Athlete

---

“I always get out of breath on hills.” “I can never sleep well before a race.” “Every time it matters , we fail.” Do these phrases sound familiar? Maybe you’ve heard them from a friend, from your coach, or , most often , from your own inner voice. They sound so convincing that we rarely stop to check them. But ask yourself one simple question: is it really “always”? Is it truly “never”? Or has your brain simply taken one or two instances and turned them into a universal law?

Welcome to the world of overgeneralization , the cognitive distortion in which a single negative experience transforms into a rule without exception. If black-and-white thinking makes you see everything as “perfect or failure,” overgeneralization makes you see failure as eternal and inevitable. And that’s precisely where its insidiousness lies.

What Is Overgeneralization?

Overgeneralization is a cognitive distortion described by David Burns as the second pattern in his classification of 10 core distortions in the book Feeling Good (1980). The definition is elegantly simple: you draw a general conclusion based on a single or small number of instances.

The mechanism works like this: something bad happens once (or two or three times) and your brain rushes to declare: “There, you see? It’s always like this.” The single event is transformed into an absolute, immutable pattern. One bad day at work means “my job is terrible.” One failed attempt means “I’ll never lift this.” One lost match means “I just can’t win when it matters.”

Overgeneralization turns the incident into identity, and the mistake into fate.

The key markers of overgeneralization are absolute words. If “always,” “never,” “every time,” “constantly,” “not once” regularly appear in your inner dialogue, you have reason to check whether you’re overgeneralizing. These words are the linguistic fingerprints of this thought pattern.

Overgeneralization in Everyday Life

Before we get to sport, let’s see how deeply overgeneralization is rooted in our everyday life. You might recognize yourself in some of these examples:

• At work: You receive critical feedback on one project and conclude: “The boss is never happy with my work.” (Yet last month they praised another one of your projects in front of the entire team.)
• In relationships: Your partner forgets one date and you react: “You always forget the things that are important to me.” (Yet for your birthday they organized a surprise.)
• With eating: You eat something sweet two days in a row and tell yourself: “I have zero discipline with food.” (Yet for the entire week before that, you ate excellently.)
• Socially: You make an awkward remark at a gathering and afterward: “I always say something stupid in social settings.” (Yet most people didn’t even notice.)

Notice the pattern: one specific event -> absolute conclusion -> emotional reaction that corresponds to the “conclusion,” not to reality. And this is precisely what makes overgeneralization so harmful , it distorts not only the thought, but also the emotion and behavior that follow.

Inside the Athlete’s Head: How Overgeneralization Destroys Athletic Performance

If in everyday life overgeneralization is annoying, in the sporting context it can be downright destructive. Sport is an environment of constant evaluation , there are numbers, times, rankings, an audience. Every result is visible and measurable. And it’s precisely this visibility that fuels overgeneralization.

Before Training or Competition

• Scenario: Last week you had a bad workout , your legs were heavy, motivation was low.
• Overgeneralization: “There, it’s going to be the same again. I always feel bad on Fridays. There’s no point even training.”
• Reality: Last week you slept 5 hours, had a stressful day at work, and didn’t eat well. This Friday the factors are completely different.

During the Workout

• Scenario: At kilometer 30 of a marathon, calf cramps start reminding you of last year’s race when you had to walk the last 5 km.
• Overgeneralization: “There, every time at kilometer 30 I fall apart. This will never change. My body just wasn’t made for marathons.”
• Reality: You’ve run four marathons. In two of them you had problems at kilometer 30, but in the other two , you didn’t. “Every time” is actually “two out of four times” , 50%, not 100%.

After the Workout

• Scenario: You weren’t able to improve your squat PR for the second consecutive session.
• Overgeneralization: “I never make progress on the squat. No matter how much I train, the result is always the same.”
• Reality: Three months ago, your squat was 10 kg lighter. Progress is real, but it’s not linear , and two stalled sessions don’t mean the end of progress.

Do you see the pattern? Overgeneralization takes one (or two) specific moments and declares them eternal truth. And this “eternal truth” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you believe you “always fall apart under pressure,” your nervous system will make sure to confirm that belief , through heightened anxiety, muscle tension, and loss of focus.

Overgeneralization and Its “Cousins”

Overgeneralization rarely comes alone. It loves company and most often appears hand in hand with other cognitive distortions:

• Black-and-white thinking: “If it’s not perfect, it’s failure” + “And it’s always a failure” = a double blow to motivation.
• Catastrophizing: “The worst always happens” , overgeneralization feeds catastrophizing with “evidence” from the past.
• Mind reading: “Everyone thinks I’m not good enough” , generalizing not only your own experiences, but also the presumed opinion of others.

Recognizing these connections is important because working on one distortion often weakens the others. When you stop overgeneralizing, you automatically reduce the material for catastrophic predictions.

How to Recognize Overgeneralization

The first step toward change is recognition. Here are several concrete signals to watch for:

1. Linguistic Markers

Watch for absolute words in your inner dialogue and in your speech:

• “Always,” “Never,” “Every time,” “Constantly,” “Not once”
• “Everyone,” “Nobody,” “The whole,” “Nothing”
• “That’s typical of me,” “I’m the type who…”

2. The Emotional Test

When you feel a strong negative emotion (hopelessness, despair, anger) after a single event, ask yourself: “Does my emotion match this specific event, or am I reacting as if it’s part of an eternal pattern?”

3. The Evidence Test

When you catch yourself thinking “Always…,” ask yourself the question: “Can I point to at least one instance when it wasn’t the case?” Usually the answer is “yes” , and that one counterexample is enough to show that “always” isn’t true.

How to Work with Overgeneralization: Practical Techniques

Recognition is the beginning, but real change comes with practice. Here are four techniques you can start applying today.

Technique 1: Replace the Absolute with the Specific

Every time you catch yourself saying “always” or “never,” force yourself to rephrase the thought with specific information:

• Instead of: “I always get out of breath on hills.”
  Try: “In the last two workouts, I got out of breath on the steep section. But a month ago, I climbed the same hill without any problem.”
• Instead of: “I can never train when I’m tired.”
  Try: “Sometimes, when I’m tired, my workouts are weaker. But there are also days when I started tired and finished better than expected.”

This technique comes directly from cognitive-behavioral therapy and is as simple as it is effective. When you replace absolute language with specific language, you return your thinking to reality.

Technique 2: Keeping an “Exceptions Journal”

This is a powerful behavioral technique. Instead of recording problems, deliberately search for and record the moments when the distortion was not confirmed:

• If you believe you “never perform well under pressure,” record every time you handle things even slightly better than expected in a stressful situation.
• If you believe you “always give up,” record the moments when you continued despite the difficulties.

After two or three weeks, you’ll have black-on-white evidence that “always” and “never” simply aren’t true. The journal becomes your antidote against your own bias.

Technique 3: The Stoic Perspective , “This Is an Opinion, Not a Fact”

Epictetus , the Stoic philosopher I frequently quote , said: “It is not things that trouble us, but our opinions about them.” Applied to overgeneralization, this means:

• Event (fact): I didn’t improve my time on the last 10K.
• Opinion (overgeneralization): I’ll never get faster.

Distinguishing facts from interpretations lies at the foundation of the Stoic approach. The practice is simple: every time you catch yourself generalizing, say to yourself (aloud or mentally): “This is an opinion, not a fact. What are the facts?”

Technique 4: The Cognitive Continuum

This technique, described by Judith Beck (2011), is especially useful for athletes who think in extremes. Instead of evaluating something as “always bad” or “never good,” place it on a scale from 0 to 100:

• “I say I never perform well in the heat. But if I look at the last 5 races in hot weather , in two of them I did well. That’s 40%, not 0%.”
• “I think I always get injured. But over the last year, I’ve had two injuries in 48 weeks of training. That’s more like 4%, not 100%.”

Numbers have a magical property , they bring the subjective feeling back into objective reality.

Why Does Our Brain Overgeneralize?

It’s not simply “bad thinking.” Overgeneralization has evolutionary logic. Our brains are programmed to seek patterns , this is one of the most powerful tools for survival. If our ancestors ate a certain fruit and got poisoned, the overgeneralization “never again that fruit” was lifesaving.

The problem is that in the modern context, this “lifesaving” tendency works against us. Overgeneralizing that “you always fail under pressure” doesn’t protect you from anything , on the contrary, it sabotages you. The brain applies a survival strategy from the savanna to the context of the marathon track , and the result is absurd.

Recognizing this evolutionary cause can be liberating. You don’t overgeneralize because you’re “weak” or “stupid” , you overgeneralize because your brain is working exactly as designed. It’s just that the design was for a different environment. And that’s precisely why we can consciously correct the pattern.

What to Remember

Overgeneralization is insidious because it’s invisible. It doesn’t shout , it whispers. It whispers “always” and “never” so quietly and convincingly that we accept them as truth without checking. But truth is rarely absolute. Truth is almost always in the nuances, in the specific context, in the particular circumstances.

The next time you catch yourself thinking “Always…” or “Never…,” pause. Ask yourself the question: “Is it really always?” And let the answer come from the facts, not from the emotions.

You don’t need to change everything. It’s enough to change one word , from “always” to “sometimes.” That small change can be the beginning of a big difference.

If you’d like to work deliberately on your thinking patterns, a psychological consultation is a good start. And if you want a comprehensive look at your psychological profile, check out the Synergistic Protocol.

---

References:
Burns, D.D. (1980). Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. New York: William Morrow.
Beck, A.T. (1963). Thinking and depression: I. Idiosyncratic content and cognitive distortions. Archives of General Psychiatry, 9(4), 324–333.
Beck, J.S. (2011). Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Basics and Beyond (2nd ed.). New York: Guilford Press.
Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (2000). The role of rumination in depressive disorders and mixed anxiety/depressive symptoms. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 109(3), 504–511.
Epictetus. Discourses and Selected Writings. Penguin Classics.