Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
The common conception of therapy involves the patient talking about their past and processing feelings as the therapist sits in a chair taking notes. While this classic therapy structure can be effective for patients striving to better understand their emotions, some patients see greater benefit from a more solution-based, goal oriented, and structured approach. For those looking to break out of unhealthy behavior cycles and change their negative thought patterns, cognitive behavior therapy can be very beneficial.
What is Cognitive behavioral therapy?
Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) is based on the idea that your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors impact your daily life and can prevent you from reaching your long-term goals or being happy. The core principle of CBT is that negative thought patterns, feelings, and unhelpful learned behaviors are the main components of psychological problems. By changing your thought patterns and learning healthier behaviors to replace the destructive ones, you can fix the psychological issues you face.
According to this psychological treatment, your thinking affects your mood and how you interpret situations. You then react to these thoughts by changing your behavior. Often, this becomes a cycle in which your behavior leads to certain outcomes that confirm your original thoughts.
For instance, you walk by a friend and say hi, and she doesn’t say anything back. If you interpret this negatively, you may now think that she doesn’t like you or is mad at you, rather than assuming she’s having a bad day or is in a rush. This leads to you avoiding her and feeling anxious when seeing her in the future. Since you don’t see her as much, she may be confused about your coldness and reach out less as well. This action then confirms your original thought, “she doesn’t like me.”
In this way, our thinking can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The goal of CBT is to stop the cycle of negative thinking, and instead identify your unhelpful thoughts. By challenging these thoughts and learning healthy ways to reframe them and react to them, you can change how you approach life. The philosophy behind CBT holds that unhelpful thinking and behaviors are habits that can be broken like anything else that negatively impacts your life.
Disorders to Treat with CBT
CBT is effective for anyone who struggles with negative thinking or anxiety spirals. It’s a great treatment for those looking to make changes in their lives, and it can give patients new tools for dealing with emotional struggles and managing feelings. Cognitive behavioral therapy can be useful for dealing with stressful life situations, relationship conflicts, low self-esteem, grief, emotional trauma, medical illness, and more.
Along with this, it’s been shown to be effective for a number of mental health disorders. Some of these include:
● Anxiety disorders
● Depression
● Substance use disorders
● Eating disorders
● OCD
● Phobias
● PTSD
● Sleep disorders
● Bipolar disorder
● Schizophrenia
● Sexual disorders
Depending on the person, CBT might be recommended along with other treatments or medications..
CBT Treatment
The goal of CBT is to learn you can control your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It teaches you to challenge your beliefs and change your behaviors. This can lead to more positive feelings, which inform your thoughts and behaviors.
For instance, rather than assuming that a friend who doesn’t reply to you is upset with you, you can practice cognitive flexibility and generate multiple alternative responses that may also be true. For example, perhaps that the friend is overwhelmed with work, lost their phone, is with family, or wants to take time to respond fully later. Instead of avoiding her, you can choose to reach out and check in or be curious. This behavior strengthens your friendship, while avoiding the friend will likely lead to anxiety and unhappiness. By changing how you interpret situations, you can adjust how you respond to them.
CBT is a solution-oriented strategy that focuses on specific problems in your life and potential solutions for them. To do this, it uses a combination of cognitive therapy and behavior therapy.
Cognitive Therapy
The objective of cognitive therapy is to alter the way you think. Negative or unhealthy thoughts can lead to self-destructive feelings and behaviors. For instance, someone who thinks they’re unlovable may avoid or self-sabotage potential relationships. When these don’t work out, the belief that they’re unworthy of love is confirmed. In cognitive therapy, you challenge those thoughts and learn better ways to cope with them, leading you to a more positive outcome.
Cognitive therapy involves identifying one’s problematic thought patterns and figuring out how to reframe them. It can also include learning problem-solving skills, gaining insight into the motivation of others, and improving self-esteem.
Behavior Therapy
Behavior therapy is designed to help you change your behavior. For example, the person who thinks they’re unlovable can learn techniques to help them maintain relationships, like healthy communication or self-regulation skills. By altering their behavior, they may begin to have closer friendships or romantic relationships, and their negative thoughts and feelings about being unlovable may recede.
One technique used in behavior therapy is using role-play to practice for the life situation that causes negative feelings. Another technique is being exposed to situations that cause negative thoughts and then coping with those thoughts with healthy behaviors.
CBT Strategies
The techniques used in CBT are all about challenging one’s thoughts and changing one’s behaviors. Some common CBT strategies include:
● Cognitive journaling- this is when patients journal about triggering situations or events, writing down what their immediate thoughts and responses were. This helps the patient to identify triggers and understand the thought patterns related to them.
● Guided discovery- this technique involves the therapist asking open-ended questions, helping the patient to understand their thoughts and how they impact their behaviors.
● Cognitive restructuring- this is all about reframing negative or unhelpful thoughts by identifying the upsetting situation, the feelings it causes, and the thoughts behind these. You then search for evidence to decide whether the thoughts are accurate, eventually replacing the thoughts with more helpful or realistic ones.
● Mindfulness and physical relaxation- this helps patients to calm their bodies down and regulate their nervous systems by techniques like meditation, breathing exercises and relaxing hobbies.
● Exposure therapy- this technique gradually exposes patients to the objects of their fear and anxiety, helping them to cope with these feelings and learn that their triggers are less harmful than they previously believed.
● Activity scheduling- a technique used for treating depression, this is when patients schedule activities that are rewarding but that they often avoid due to depression or anxiety.
● Successive approximation- this skill-building technique helps patients achieve difficult or large tasks by breaking them up into smaller pieces.
What to Expect
Cognitive behavior therapy is based on each individual client, so treatment will look different depending on the person. First, the mental health professional and the patient will identify the problem and create a strategy for treatment. This can include goal setting, where you identify what you hope to get from therapy. Therapists will also often provide information about your specific struggle, helping you to better understand your psychological problem.
During sessions, you’ll use CBT techniques to understand and challenge your thought patterns. Along with this, you’ll do behavior therapy to alter your unhelpful or self-destructive behaviors. CBT also involves doing “homework,” which involves practicing the strategies you learned in session. The goal is for the patient to eventually be able to use these coping skills on their own, changing their own thought patterns, feelings, and behaviors to improve their quality of life.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
Learn how to manage your unhelpful thoughts and behaviors today.