Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is one of the most commonly used forms of psychotherapy today and is a combination of two therapeutic modalities, cognitive therapy and behavioural therapy. The essential foundation of CBT outlines the relationship between our thoughts, our feelings, and our behavior.
CBT is a short-term form of psychotherapy, based on the premise that the way an individual thinks and feels ultimately affects the way the individual behaves. CBT aims to resolve present day struggles, such as anxiety, depression, anger issues, stress, relationship issues, or other concerns that may be affecting one’s quality of life. CBT focuses particularly on modifying dysfunctional emotions, thoughts, and behaviours through interrogating negative and irrational beliefs. It is considered more as a “solutions-oriented” method of psychotherapy.
CBT helps to identify any maladaptive or distorted thoughts that may be impacting mental wellbeing. CBT helps clients develop strategies to challenge maladaptive thinking and behavioral patterns to create balance. Within therapy, clients will learn how to replace their negative thinking and behavioral patterns with more rational and helpful ones.
CBT is appropriate for all ages, including children, adolescents and adults. In terms of how long CBT typically takes until one may be terminated from psychotherapy, CBT takes about 8 -12 sessions with a counsellor, when sessions are about 50 minutes long. Treatment may continue for additional sessions that are spaced further apart, while the individual can take time practicing on skills that have been built up on their own.
CBT is used to treat a wide range of issues, for example it may help you:
Mental health disorders that may improve through using CBT include:
Cognitive behavioral therapy has shown to be an effective evidence-based treatment for anxiety therapy, depression therapy, OCD therapy, ADHD therapy and several other treatment areas such as eating disorders.
CBT integrates cognitive and behavioural strategies to help individuals examine the way they perceive or react to a situation. When a person is undergoing stress or fear, their initial reaction and response is typically distorted by the fear centre of the brain as a survival response, leading to exaggerated or unrealistic perceptions and reactions. Over time, these distortions can produce maladaptive beliefs that can further perpetuate negative thinking patterns. CBT helps clients adapt the way they perceive themselves, others, the world, to reduce unhealthy negative thinking patterns, ultimately improving their mental well being.
CBT uses formulations to identify automatic thoughts that help increase self awareness. Automatic thoughts are thoughts that instinctively arise within our minds all throughout one’s days. Oftentimes, we are completely unaware we are even having these thoughts, but with instruction, we can identify them and as a further result, get a better grasp of your mood, feeling and behaviour. Some examples of automatic thoughts include:
Our minds are made to be thought-processing machines, creating and molding as many as 60,000 ideas in one given day. If we were to attend to every single thought, our minds would ultimately explode with an overwhelming amount of information. This being said, our brain does filter out what is deemed as less important and focuses on more salient thoughts and ideas. At some times, we assign meaning to a thought/idea that is not totally grounded upon actual facts of a situation, further leading to irrational beliefs from negative automatic thoughts.
Automatic thoughts have the potential to trigger an intense irrational emotion. In most situations, it is the automatic thought that plays a significant role in determining how we feel, not the actual situation itself. For example, a performance review for a sport or a job contains feedback typically on fixates and praises. Given this situation, an individual may filter out most of the praise and focus only on the areas of improvement, this is called negative filtering. Negative filtering might cause us to perceive the whole situation and performance review as wholly negative, further triggering emotions of anxiety, sadness, or disappointment in oneself.
Identifying automatic thoughts can be done so through CBT, more specifically a strategy known as a thought record. A thought record is a tool designed to clarify such thoughts that lead to unwanted feelings and behaviours. The use of a thought record most often looks like:
Overall, by gaining better awareness of our automatic negative thoughts, we can prevent a thought spiral in its tracks, which will slow down the intense emotional reaction and allow us to create a more rational response that won’t leave us feeling anxious or depressed.
CBT targets cognitive distortions or any irrational beliefs that adversely cause behaviour. One of the primary skills/strategies used within CBT for rewiring our thought patterns is cognitive restructuring. Cognitive restructuring is known as identifying ineffective patterns in thinking, and changing them to be more effective, essentially this can help trigger less of a negative emotion, seeing situations, emotions, and/or behaviours more clearly.
Cognitive restructuring is not about flipping to the most positive alternative, it is concerned with developing a more realistic viewpoint that considers both positives and negatives about a situation. At some points, you may feel an immediate response for a thought, and other times you may have to rehearse a new way of thinking about a difficult situation prior to it influencing your feelings in an impartial way.
The steps for cognitive restructuring look like:
In addition to identifying automatic thoughts and using cognitive restructuring for such irrational beliefs, CBT helps individuals identify cognitive distortions that lead to patterned mental habits over time. Some examples of cognitive distortions include:
CBT teaches you effective strategies to challenge such cognitive distortions though cognitive restructuring techniques
Overall the goal of CBT is to get clients actively involved in their own journey and treatment, so they are able to understand how to improve their lives and adjust their thinking throughout everyday situations.
Contact us for cognitive behavioral therapy in Hamilton or reach out for online therapy and one of our CBT therapists will help create a specializing treatment plan!