Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

The human brain is full of mysteries and layers, and as a result, sometimes the complexity of these layers may lead to disturbed thought patterns, anxiety, PTSD, depression, chronic pain, or complex mental illness. If a person tends to blame themselves for anything and everything that is happening around them, they might be facing some sort of mental health issue, here Cognitive Behavioral Therapy i.e CBT comes into the picture as it is known to therapeutically help an individual to revert their negative thoughts and push them to a more optimistic and constructive thought process.

CBT or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a psychotherapeutic technique that enables people to recognize, monitor, and change their negative thought patterns or behavior. It focuses on changing and rather, replacing the negative thoughts and feelings, emotional issues, anxiety, depression of a person with optimistic and realistic thoughts.

It refers, relates, and aims to the ultimate mental health improvement of a person by changing the cognitive deformities and attitude, monitoring emotions, and supporting them to develop the coping techniques that help them to focus on solving one problem at a time.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy isn’t simply about monitoring and modulating thought patterns but it is a collection of a range of strategies meant to support people to defeat these thoughts, these treatments are given by cognitive behavioral therapists.

Now, these strategies may include techniques like role-playing, relaxation therapies or methods, journaling, and mental distractions, etc.

CBT has proven to be of huge use in the treatment of a wide range of mental health issues including PTSD( Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), depression, and anxiety are some specific problems addressed in these treatments. It is based on understanding the links between thoughts and behaviors and assisting the individuals in recognizing and breaking away from their negative thought patterns.

Cognitive Therapy: Cognitive Therapy is a therapeutic technique that functions on the basis of a person’s thought process, emotional and behavioral patterns, and emotional state. It concentrates on present-day behavior, emotions, and communication of a person with themselves and others rather than their past emotions or experiences and therefore, works on the basis of the problem-solving phenomenon.

It was developed by an American psychiatrist, Aaron T. Beck. It is a psychotherapy method that comes under CBT and is medically reviewed.

It is based on the Cognitive Model, as per which, an individual’s thoughts, behavior, emotions are all interlinked and can be modified by the achievement of goals, and working on changing the disturbing thought patterns, behavior, and distressing emotional responses, these processes also require short-term counseling sessions by their therapists.

Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT): It refers to mindfulness, i.e being completely involved in the activities going on in the present, not just physically but mentally as well. It is a combination of cognitive-behavioral techniques and mindfulness techniques to have a better understanding of thoughts and emotions to be able to better manage them to reduce the distressing feelings. This technique allows an individual to separate their sense of being from their thoughts which, in turn, allows them to be detached from the same negative thought cycle and treat a wide range of emotional anxiety. This further enables them to believe that their negative dimension and their sense of being can exist simultaneously and do not need to leap over each other. This, therefore, contributes to healing as it helps the person to input positive thoughts in their negative thought cycles to suppress the negative moods.

Popular Techniques Used In CBT:

Journaling: Writing down negative beliefs or thoughts in a journal and also writing positive thoughts that can potentially replace them for a week or so.
Questioning Yourself: By questioning your perceptions about yourself.
Setting Goals: Setting measurable, realistic, and achievable goals to be achieved within a time limit, this helps in coping skills and coming back to daily routine life.
Recording Thoughts: Urging yourself to come up with a piece of evidence to support your negative thought and then another proof against it, and then using the second evidence to develop a better realistic thought.
Cognitive Restructuring: This is focusing on any kind of cognitive distortions affecting the thoughts of the person, like jumping to conclusions, etc, and then solving them.
Doing Mood-lifting Activities: Buying yourself your favorite chocolates or getting flowers for yourself, watching a good movie, hanging out with friends, this step involves self-love.
Talk With Self: It’s important to talk to yourself, recognize the negative parts of your talk and try and replace them with optimistic or positive and constructive thoughts, these are mainly acceptance and commitment therapy.
Exposing Yourself To Negative Situations: It means to jot down the things or conditions that cause stress in the order of the amount of the stress that each one of the causes and then gradually facing them until you feel a decrease in the negative impact, this is considered to be a long-term solution to most of emotional issues.