Growing close to Christmas, I have been feeling sadder and more anxious. It's not hard to see why - it is 12 months since my separation from Nadia and Christmas is a season that I love. My family is split and so I have been avoiding thinking about the day itself.

Any counsellor will tell you that avoiding anything (except those things that are dangerous) is likely to increase stress, anxiety and the ability to cope. I should have been telling myself that but for the fact that I had fallen, perhaps unwittingly, into a deep well of cognitively distorted thinking. It's been happening for months now and yesterday, my sadness was such that I had had enough. I pulled out my one of my CBT texts and started reading again. Thinking errors were in abundance.

So over the next few days or weeks, I'd like to take you through some of the most common thinking errors, replete with my own distorted record.