What is Cognitive Behavioral therapy?
Cognitive Behavioural therapy is psycho social intervention that focuses on changing of unhelpful thoughts, beliefs, attitudes and behaviour and improve emotional regulation. CBT is today the most popular option for treating mental illness among most major health organizations. The approach was introduced relatively recently and is a natural extension of another school of psychology that rained previously (around the 50s).The idea was that if you experienced two stimulus at the same time often enough, they would eventually become linked in your mind. In neuroplasticity ‘neurons that fire together, wire together’. This means that if two neurons fire at the same time often enough, they eventually grow a very strong connection which might cause the other to fire involuntarily.psychology. The hypothesis was that we could learn phobias, for example, by associating negative experiences with harmless objects. Likewise, it was theorized that you could treat a phobia via ‘reassociation’. If you classically condition someone to associate that stimulus with positive things again, they eventually lose the phobia. And this method proved successful in various studies.For instance, you can learn to be afraid of heights even if you’ve never fallen from a height. How? By constantly thinking about how bad it might be to fall from a height. In other words, if you keep imagining that falling must be dangerous and if you tell yourself things like ‘those railings don’t look safe’, then you can cause yourself to be afraid. So the idea behind CBT is to use the principles of behaviorism but to combine these with the cognitive aspect. That means not only using elements like ‘reassociation’ but also ‘thinking’ cures.
Techniques Used in CBT
One example of this is to use mindfulness meditation. Simply by choosing not to let your thoughts and emotions affect you, you can become less controlled by them and thereby less susceptible to your own fears and ruminations.But there are many more aspects to this too and these tend to fall under the heading of ‘cognitive restructuring’ or in other words – changing your thoughts. One example is something called ‘thought challenging’. Here, you simply breakdown one of your thoughts or beliefs and thereby assess just how accurate it is.For instance, you might find that you are afraid of talking public because you think people will laugh at you if you stutter. This is a debilitating belief that is ironically making you much more likely to stutter. So what you need to do in order to overcome this is to look at the thought and ask: is it realistic? What you’ll find 90% of the time is that this belief is unlikely and unfounded. Most people would not be harsh enough to laugh at you if you stuttered and even if they did, it wouldn’t matter because you wouldn’t see them again.Another example is hypothesis testing. Essentially, it means that you’re testing your theory to work out whether or not it really holds up.So if you’re afraid people will laugh if you stutter during public speaking, that means you need to purposefully stutter on stage and let everyone see it. This will then in turn show you what happens in that scenario – and what you’ll likely discover is that nothing happens. People are kind and they’ll just wait for you to finish and start again.
How to use cognitive restructuring and mindfulness?
We use mindfulness in order to identify the negative thoughts and then we apply cognitive restructuring in order to change them.This has been used to treat anxiety, depression , phobias, addiction and much more. But if you don’t have any of this problems we can still cognitive restructuring. this isn’t just a tool for healing but also a tool for self-improvement. And there are countless ways you can use it to make yourself calmer, more confident and more productive.And there are countless ways you can use it to make yourself calmer, more confident and more productive.