Your heart is pounding and your mind is flooded with different worries. This anxiousness is now impacting your sleep and starting to impact your job and relationships. You start thinking about reaching out to a mental health therapist for help. When looking at different therapists’ websites or Psychology Today ads, you read about various treatment theories they use. It can be a little overwhelming to read through the psychotherapy jargon. One of the treatment theories that you may come across and one that I use is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or CBT for short.
CBT is a treatment used in talk therapy that challenges negative thought patterns to change negative patterns of behavior or moods such as anxiety or depression. For example, if you are thinking a lot about how you might fail at your job, you might find yourself avoiding certain tasks and avoiding certain co-workers. You then might feel anxious whenever a challenging work task presents itself causing further avoidance. We can have undesirable thought patterns that can negatively impact our moods and behavior.
How Does CBT Work?
CBT works to challenge those thoughts by assessing if they are a fact or a belief, how realistic they are, whether the event has happened before, and if it should happen, how you can cope with it. By challenging our thoughts, we can begin to restructure them to feel less negative, feel neutral, or even more positive. Through CBT, we explore what we do not have control over and what we do have control over.