Pattern library
Every pattern Pattern Coach helps you spot
25 recurring patterns across thinking, behavior, emotion, and identity. Read the ones that sound like you.
Thinking Patterns
Cognitive Distortion
All-or-Nothing Thinking
Seeing things in two settings — perfect or ruined, all in or done. There's no middle gear, so one slip reads as total failure.
Cognitive Distortion
Analysis Paralysis
Gathering so much information that the decision never gets made. Thinking becomes a sophisticated way of not acting.
Cognitive Distortion
Catastrophizing
Jumping to the worst-case ending and treating it as the likely one. A small setback becomes proof that everything is about to fall apart.
Cognitive Distortion
Comparison Trap
Measuring your insides against everyone else's outsides, and always coming up short. The scoreboard is rigged and never turns off.
Cognitive Distortion
Rumination
Replaying the same painful thought on a loop without resolving it. It feels like problem-solving but produces only more of the feeling.
Cognitive Distortion
Scarcity Thinking
Operating as if there's never enough — time, money, opportunity, love — so every choice feels like a loss you can't afford.
Behavioral Patterns
Behavioral Loop
Avoidance
Steering around what feels threatening, so the discomfort shrinks now and the problem grows later.
Behavioral Loop
Boundary Erosion
Letting small overreaches slide until your limits quietly disappear and you're stretched past what you agreed to.
Behavioral Loop
Lack of Follow Through
Starting with real intent and fading before the finish, so effort rarely turns into results.
Behavioral Loop
People Pleasing
Managing everyone else's feelings at the cost of your own needs. It reads as kindness but quietly builds resentment.
Behavioral Loop
Perfectionism
Setting an impossibly high bar, then treating anything short of it as failure. It poses as high standards but mostly produces delay and self-criticism.
Behavioral Loop
Procrastination
Delaying what matters by staying busy with what doesn't, trading a calm start for a frantic finish.
Meta Pattern
Self-Sabotage
Undermining yourself right as things start going well — pulling the rug before someone else can.
Behavioral Loop
Shiny Object Syndrome
Chasing the next exciting idea before the last one is finished, so nothing compounds.
Emotional Patterns
Emotional Response
Emotional Decision Making
Letting the feeling of the moment make choices that the calm version of you wouldn't.
Emotional Response
Emotional Suppression
Pushing feelings down instead of feeling them, until they leak out sideways or shut you down.
Emotional Response
Fear of Rejection
Organizing your choices around not being turned down, so you never quite ask for what you want.
Identity Belief
Impostor Syndrome
Believing your success is a fluke and that exposure is one mistake away, no matter the evidence.
Emotional Response
Validation Seeking
Outsourcing your sense of worth to other people's approval, so your stability depends on their reactions.
Identity Patterns
Identity Belief
Control Seeking
Trying to manage every variable so nothing can surprise you — and exhausting yourself in the attempt.
Identity Belief
External Locus of Control
Crediting your outcomes to luck, fate, or other people, so your own agency stays invisible to you.
Identity Belief
Identity Inertia
Staying who you've always been because the old self-story is familiar, even when it no longer fits.
Identity Belief
Learned Helplessness
Concluding that nothing you do matters, so you stop trying — even when the situation has changed and effort would now work.
Identity Belief
Negative Self-Talk
Running a harsh inner commentary that you'd never use on anyone else, and mistaking it for the truth.
Meta Pattern
Overconfidence
Overestimating what you know or can do, so you skip the preparation that would have kept you safe.