Be Your Own Therapist With the Basics of CBT
The problem is not that India falls short when the mental health awareness scene comes into being. The problem is even the experts don’t know how to simplify the complexity of therapy and counselling for the common person. I am starting a weekly blog column, where I will write about mental health awareness hacks every Tuesday. Today, let’s talk about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.
CBT is a way to learn new skills to help us feel better and live our best lives. It’s like learning a new language or a new game — it might take some practice, but it can be a lot of fun!
Cognitive-behavioral therapy, or CBT, is a type of talk therapy that improves a person’s mood by altering their thoughts and behaviors.
Let’s begin with a few issues that CBT can be used to solve. Do you ever feel depressed or anxious? Does anyone experience sleep issues? CBT can be useful for certain issues! Physical issues like pain can also be helped by it.
Let’s now discuss how CBT functions. Visualizing our thoughts, feelings, and actions as a circle can be helpful. A thought might cause us to feel a certain way when we have it. And our feelings have the power to influence how we behave. If you believe, for instance, that “I’m not good at maths,” you can experience sadness or frustration.
Additionally, you might not want to try to complete your math homework if you are depressed or angry.
CBT enables us to interrupt the cycle and alter our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors for the better. We achieve this by acquiring new ways of thinking and acting. We might discover how to think more highly of ourselves or how to go forward incrementally rather than feeling overwhelmed.
In CBT, we work with three types of thought levels:
Core Beliefs:
These are the core beliefs we hold, ones we first received as children, about who we are and how the world works. For instance, if a person experiences constant inadequacy, they may develop a deep-seated sense of worthlessness.
Automatic thoughts:
These are the thoughts that frequently and quickly cross our minds without our awareness. They might have a beneficial or negative impact on how we feel and act. For instance, if a person notices a bunch of children laughing, they might automatically think, “They’re laughing at me.”
Intermediate Beliefs:
The thoughts that sit in between automatic and fundamental beliefs are referred to as intermediate beliefs. They are more detailed beliefs about who we are and the world we live in that we might not even be aware of. A core belief like “I am worthless” could be accompanied by an intermediate belief like “If I don’t get an A on this test, I am a failure.”
Conclusion
CBT is a way to learn new skills to help us feel better and live our best lives. It’s like learning a new language or a new game — it might take some practice, but it can be a lot of fun! You just have to keep at it.
