Your mind is your home! It is what dictates how you function, behave, perform, and face life. It is the most significant thing that you need to keep in check. It is the home of your thoughts. Thoughts have a significant impact on what you do, how you do it, how you behave, and everything you do. Thus, try and ask yourself, if your mind is your home, what are the thoughts that you think?
They are the furniture, the surroundings, and the small things in your house that make it your home. It might be the aroma, the aesthetics, and everything else about your home. It won’t be wrong to say that those thoughts alone make up your mind.
So let us now take a deeper dive and discover what all that stuff can influence in your life. I guess you already know the answer, don’t you? Pretty much everything.
Your thoughts shape your beliefs, habits, activities, and hence your behaviour. They are responsible for almost everything happening in your life. It might be far-fetched to say they completely influence everything around you.
Now that we know how important these thoughts are, let’s also check how these thoughts can be controlled, and used supportively. It will help you manage your mental distress and discomfort. Recognise negative thoughts and behaviors, or get better at what you do, no matter what it might be.
What is cognitive therapy?
Cognitive-behavioral therapy is a widely accepted form of psychotherapy. Here you attend sessions with a mental health counsellor in a structured way. It is often a short-term therapy technique. Such psychotherapy helps you become aware of inaccurate and negative thinking patterns. It allows you to see difficult situations from a different angle. It in turn, allows you to respond to them more effectively. Its main focus is to recognise negative thoughts and behavior.
Cognitive behaviour therapy is a helpful tool in psychotherapy to treat mental illnesses. However, you don’t have to have a mental illness to benefit from such mental health treatment. Cognitive behaviour therapy is effective for teaching management of stressful life situations to just about anyone since the ability to recognise negative thoughts and behaviour is important to everyday life. It can help you identify and cope with certain challenges quickly. This mental health treatment is effective for addressing emotional challenges through psychotherapy. Hence, it is a short-term therapy technique. It may help you:
- manage mental illness
- prevent a relapse of mental illness
- recognize negative thoughts and behaviors
- treat mental illness when medications aren’t suitable
- cope with stressful life situations
- manage difficult emotions
- resolve conflicts
- learn better ways to communicate
- to get over grief or loss
- deal with trauma related to abuse or violence
- manage chronic physical symptoms
- deal with relationship difficulties
- to Deal with a Breakup or Divorce
- face a serious health condition like cancer
- boost low self-esteem
- reduce insomnia
Mental illnesses that cognitive behaviour therapy might help with, include:
- Depression
- Anxiety disorders
- Phobias
- PTSD
- Sleep disorders
- Eating disorders
- Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)
- Substance abuse and addiction
- Bipolar disorder
- Schizophrenia
- Sexual disorders
- Anger issues
- Panic attacks
- Personality disorders
- Phobias
What techniques are used in cognitive behavioural therapy?
Cognitive behaviour therapy involves using different short-term therapy techniques in psychotherapy. Your mental health counsellor will narrow down the ones that fit you.
Mental health treatment usually helps:
- learn emotional problem-solving
- to understand how incorrect thinking can make problems worse
- learn to face challenging situations and fears
- use role-playing and calming techniques when faced with potentially challenging situations
- gain confidence and self-esteem
- recognise and avoid negative thoughts and behavior.
The techniques recognise negative thoughts and behaviours and help replace them with encouraging and realistic ones. Helping bring out the best in you.
Some popular techniques used in cognitive behaviour therapy include:
Identifying Negativity: It is critical to learn how thoughts, feelings, and situations contribute to unwanted behavior. The process can be difficult, especially for people who struggle with introspection. ultimately leads to self-discovery and insights essential for mental health treatment.
Goal-Setting: Goal-setting is instrumental in recovery from mental illness. It helps you make enormous improvements in your health and life. A therapist can help with goal-setting skills by teaching you how to set SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-based) goals. A therapist will guide you to focus on the process, enabling you to implement the techniques successfully.
Guided discovery and questioning: A counsellor questions the presumptions you have about yourself or your situation. The counsellor challenges the negative thoughts to consider better alternative perspectives.
Journalizing and self-monitoring: You could be asked to note your negative beliefs that pop into your mind. The positive ones are also jotted down so that you can use them to replace the negative ones. Self-monitoring is an invaluable part of cognitive behaviour therapy. It involves tracking behavior, symptoms, or experiences over time and sharing them with your mental health counselor. It offers the information required to provide the most appropriate mental health treatment. For people coping with eating disorders, self-monitoring may involve keeping track of eating habits. Any thoughts or feelings that occur along with consuming that meal or snack also need to be managed.
Self-talk: Mental health counsellor may ask you what you tell yourself about certain situations or experiences to challenge your critical self-talk with constructive and compassionate self-talk.
Cognitive restructuring: This involves looking at cognitive distortions affecting you, Such as black-or-white thinking, jumping to conclusions, catastrophizing, uprooting, and exposing them consciously to make them futile.
Thought recording: You record your thoughts and feelings during specific situations in order to find rationales for and against your negative belief.These rationales are used to develop realistic and supportive thought processes.
Positive activities: Scheduling enjoyable activities such as meditation and mindfulness on a daily basis can boost positivity and improve mood.
Situation exposure: This involves noting the situations or things that cause stress, in order of how much stress they cause, and gradually exposing yourself to such things until negative feelings lessen. Systematic desensitisation is a similar technique where relaxation is used to cope with your feelings in difficult situations.
Some other techniques that can help solve problems are:
Social Skils Training: The client may have difficulty socializing, maybe due to a lack of relevant social skills that must be acquired for better interpersonal interactions. The therapist can help clients gain social skills, like learning how to start a conversation and be a good listener too.
Changing Underlying Assumptions: To effectively modify underlying assumptions, the client needs to be helped to identify these cognitions and their negative effects. It can be useful to help the client write new assumptions as a substitute for the dysfunctional ones.
Decatastrophizing: Clients sometimes react as though the outcome could be a complete catastrophe. The therapist can help the client visualize if they are overestimating the nature of the problem.
Behavioral Practice: It can be useful to help clients develop emotional and conversational skills. Behaviours such as discussing a problem with a significant other, and disciplining a child, could be practiced. This allows the therapist to give feedback and coach the client on how to be more effective. This strategy might be used to increase the client’s comfort in dealing with the situation.
Examining the Evidence: Optimal way to challenge a dysfunctional thought is to assess both the extent to which the thought is validated or refuted by the available evidence and whether other interpretations would fit the evidence better. It involves considering the source of evidence and the validity of the client’s conclusions. Also considering whether the client is ignoring the evidence. This approach can help challenge and change the client’s conclusion.
Labeling Distortions: Clients may find it useful to label cognitive distortions they recognise among their automatic thoughts, which weakens the emotional impact of such thoughts.
Self-instruction Training: Meichenbaum developed an extensive model to understand the role of self-instructions in controlling impulses and hence behavior. When a client has problems with controlling impulses, explicit training in self-instruction might be helpful to develop self-control. The therapist and client develop a set of instructions to follow for adaptive behavior.
Guided Discovery: Using a set of simple questions, such as “What would that mean?, What would happen then?”, therapists can help clients explore the significance of events. The therapist works with the client to understand the connections between his ideas, thoughts, and images.
Cognitive-behavioral exercises
Cognitive behavioural therapy usually includes efforts to change thinking patterns. These exercises may include:
- Learning to stay relaxed, calm, and composed in difficult situations allows you to think with a level head
- Facing fears head-on, instead of avoiding
- Learning to develop a sense of confidence in one’s abilities
- Understanding the motivations behind certain behaviors
- Learning to recognise distortions in thinking. Evaluate and recognise the distortions taking reality into account
- Getting through difficult situations by developing a problem-solving mindset
- Using role-play to prepare for potentially problematic interactions and conflicts with others
It emphasises on helping individuals to learn to be their own help. Through exercises in the sessions as well as “homework” exercises outside of sessions, patients can develop coping mechanisms. These help to change their thinking, problematic emotions, and behaviors.
Cognitive behaviour therapy counsellors emphasise what is happening in their day-to-day lives rather than what led to their difficulties. A certain amount of knowledge about one’s personal history is required. However, the primary focus is on developing effective ways of coping with life with a short-term therapy technique.
Cognitive behaviour therapy is implied to focus on present thoughts and beliefs. The underlying assumption behind is that thoughts and feelings are fundamental precursors of behavior.
Homework is a critical part of cognitive behaviour therapy. Since practising therapy skills and applying the techniques is important to benefit practically. It involves adopting the skills you learn in therapy, such as replacing self-criticism with self-compassion or keeping track of negative thoughts to replace them.
Cognitive behaviour therapy has the following advantages:
- It helps develop healthier thinking patterns by becoming aware of the negative ones.
- It is effective in controlling a lot of certain behaviors.
- It is an affordable form of therapy.
- You can work face-to-face and even online.
- Psychotropic medication can be used to solve problems.
- It helps you to develop coping skills that can be utilised everyday.
Examples of cognitive behaviour therapy
If you have a dental phobia, you might fear heading to the dentist. You might believe you will experience severe pain after having a dental procedure. This may stem from a negative experience, likely from childhood.
A mental health counsellor can work with you to change your thinking. Together, you and the counsellor develop a plan to make you see future dental treatments differently. It can be done in small, manageable steps to turn off the fear.
Similarly, if you think a lot about plane crashes and other disasters, you may be perpetually scared of air travel. The aim of cognitive behaviour therapy is to teach that, though not every aspect of environment can be controlled but still perception and the way one deals with situations can be controlled.
