Ever find yourself spiralling down a rabbit hole of negative thoughts, feeling like there’s no escape?
If that sounds familiar, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) might just be the game changer you’re looking for. Let’s delve into how CBT can help transform those pesky negative thoughts into positive, empowering ones.
What is CBT?
Cognitive behavioural therapy is a type of psychotherapy that focuses on identifying and changing negative thought patterns and behaviours. The idea is pretty straightforward: our thoughts, feelings, and actions are all interconnected. By tweaking our thoughts and behaviours, we can change our emotional responses, leading to a happier, more fulfilling life.
How CBT Works
1. Identifying Negative Thought Patterns The first step in CBT is recognizing the negative thought patterns that often go unnoticed. These can be automatic thoughts, like “I’m not good enough,” or more complex beliefs, like “I’ll never be happy.” By bringing these thoughts to the surface, we can start to challenge and change them.
2. Challenging Negative Thoughts Once we’ve identified these negative thoughts, the next step is to challenge them. This involves questioning their validity and considering alternative perspectives. For example, if you constantly think you’re a failure, CBT might encourage you to look at your past successes and accomplishments to provide a more balanced view.
3. Replacing Negative Thoughts After challenging the negative thoughts, CBT focuses on replacing them with more positive, realistic ones. This might involve affirmations, visualizations, or simply reminding yourself of your strengths and achievements.
4. Behavioural Changes CBT also involves making practical changes in your behaviour to support your new, positive mindset. This might include setting small, achievable goals, practicing mindfulness, or engaging in activities that bring you joy and fulfilment.
The Benefits of CBT
Increased Self-Esteem: As you start to replace negative thoughts with positive ones, you’ll likely notice an improvement in your self-esteem. CBT helps you recognize your worth and build a more positive self-image.
Better Relationships: Improved mental health and self-esteem often lead to better relationships. When you feel good about yourself, you’re more likely to engage in healthy, fulfilling relationships with others.
Enhanced Problem-Solving Skills: CBT teaches you to approach problems with a more balanced, rational mindset. This can enhance your problem-solving skills and make you more resilient in the face of challenges.
Greater Life Satisfaction: Ultimately, the goal of CBT is to improve your overall life satisfaction. By transforming negative thoughts into positive ones, CBT can help you lead a happier, more fulfilling life.
Final Thoughts
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is a powerful tool for anyone looking to overcome negative thoughts and improve their mental health. With its focus on changing thought patterns and behaviours, CBT can help you build a more positive, empowering mindset.
So, if you’re tired of feeling stuck in a cycle of negativity, consider giving CBT a try. It might just be the secret weapon you need to transform your life.
Remember, it’s always a good idea to seek out a professional therapist to guide you through the CBT process. They can provide personalised support and help you make the most out of this transformative therapy.
It’s Mental Health Awareness week 2024: with the theme of “Movement: Moving more for our mental health”
So, how do we define movement?
Well, it can be any type of movement that has a positive benefit on your social, emotional, and physical wellbeing. If it is meaningful, rewarding and you enjoy it, then you are more likely to repeat it.
Engaging in any type of meaningful activity that gives a sense of pleasure, achievement and purpose will improve your mental health, reduce anxiety, depression, low mood and improve your self-esteem. Participating in activity that we enjoy, such as exercise, whether it be walking in the fresh air, working out at a gym, or going to a yoga class, can have such positive effects on our wellbeing.
If exercise isn’t for you, movement doesn’t need to be structured, it can be any type of physical activity, which increases your movement, which could include domestic chores, necessary tasks, playing football with your children, dancing around the house or walking to the shop.
However, sometimes this feels tricky if we are experiencing low mood and a loss of motivation.
When this happens, we probably start to move less as we start to avoid engaging in some of our daily activities. As you avoid these activities, you then reduce your opportunity for social and personal activities that give you pleasure and achievement. Behavioural activation is a treatment technique used in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to help you to address avoidance and focus on activities to reestablish daily routines, increase pleasurable activities, and address important necessary tasks, therefore, increasing movement and supporting positive wellbeing.
This strategy helps clients to re-engage in activities to improve their level of pleasure and achievement, improving their mood and improving their positive thoughts leading to an increase in motivation.
How do we overcome this:
Make a list of activities that you’ve stopped doing (routine, pleasurable and necessary)
Think about new activities that you might like to start
Start small and try to plan and schedule activities into your day starting with the easiest, e.g., go for a daily walk
Be consistent
Regular small activities are better in the early stages to reduce procrastination and to encourage motivation.
Therefore… just try a little bit of extra movement and see the positive benefits on your wellbeing.
Find out more about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in Shean’s earlier blogLearn more about Shean and her approach to therapy with her clients
Occupational therapist Shean Cadby-Lynch explains why Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) can help your mental wellbeing
The focus of the blog today is about CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapy) and how it might be able to help you.
I qualified as an occupational therapist is 2002 and practised in many different mental health settings over the years. In 2010, I trained to be a cognitive behavioural psychotherapist.
The two professions work rather well together and, as someone who is dual trained, I am able to use all of my skills and knowledge to work with someone in a client centred, holistic way.
Today, I will be trying to explore: What is CBT and how can it help your emotional wellbeing?
It’s such a great question because there are so many therapy options out there, from psychoanalytic therapy to counselling to Gestalt Therapy, so how do you know if CBT is for you?
Feelings and behaviours
Well firstly, do you want a therapy that would help you look at the relationship between your thoughts, feelings and behaviours, and how they interact with each other and have an effect on each other? If so, then CBT might be what you are looking for.
CBT is a talking therapy and is based on the concept that there is a relationship between our thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. You and your therapist will look at how your thoughts, beliefs and attitudes affect your feelings and how you behave, and vice versa.
It is based on the belief that how we think about situations can affect how we feel and how we then behave in these situations. For example, if you experience negative thoughts about a situation, you might then experience negative emotions such as low mood, which can then impact on our behaviour (such as withdrawing or isolating ourselves from the situation which has caused the negative thought).
This is what we call in the CBT world, a ‘vicious cycle.’ CBT therapy can support and help you to change these vicious cycles so that you can change and alter the way you think, feel and behave, so that you can overcome your difficulties, feel more positive, and improve your emotional well-being.
Low self-esteem
CBT is evidence-based therapy, which means that there’s a lot of research into how effective and helpful it is with depression and anxiety disorders, such as depression, generalised anxiety, panic, health anxiety, phobias, OCD, PTSD and low self-esteem.
When you first see a CBT therapist you will have an assessment and this is where you look at the difficulties that you’re experiencing, whether that’s symptoms of low mood, anxiety, or both, and how it is affecting your present, day-to-day life.
There is a myth that CBT does not deal with past issues and yes, most CBT sessions do focus on the ‘here and now’, as you are exploring and tackling current difficulties and exploring what is maintaining these difficulties.
But it doesn’t mean that past problems or issues are discounted or not addressed, as past experiences may be an important contributory factor in the development of the problem.
CBT treatment
CBT treatment is goal orientated and can be short-term if a problem is mild. In that case, as little as six sessions could make a big difference. Whereas more complex situations may require up to 20 sessions or more.
Sessions are reviewed on a regular basis to ensure treatment remains goal focused, client centred and collaborative.
One of the things that makes CBT different to other types of therapy is the focus on in session ‘tasks’ and ‘homework’, which are practical tasks that you and your therapist work through together in a session. The you, as the client, would practise these activities or tasks outside of the session. For example, you might keep a mood diary or a thought record.
These ‘tasks’ would be reviewed at the following session, together, and this would enable you to start to build a ‘toolbox’ of strategies for you to use, both during your period of therapy and in the future, remaining valuable long after therapy is completed.
Therapy
You would be an active participant in therapy and would want to allow yourself time to complete the in-between session tasks, to enable you to get the most out of your therapy experience.
The therapeutic relationship between the therapist and the client is really important and for me, this is one of the main contributory factors to successful therapy, as well as active engagement from the client in the treatment process.
Treatment is collaborative whereby you and the therapist work together to explore your thoughts, feelings, behaviours, triggers, and maintenance factors, to enable effective treatment planning and implementation to be carried out that is both goal orientated, client focused and holistic, putting you, the client at the heart of treatment.
I hope my first blog has helped explain CBT just a little?
Maybe you can relate to some of the difficulties I’ve mentioned today? If so, CBT might be a therapy that you want to consider. So, please do give us a call or email kate@wellbeingtherapysolutions.co.uk for a chat.
