CBT looks at our feelings, our thoughts, and our behaviors. It looks at how our feelings impact our behaviors and how our behaviors impact our feelings. If we don’t feel good or feel like exercising, then we likely won’t exercise. Many of us operate in a way where we are driven by our feelings and how we feel directly impact our behavior.
CBT looks at what we think and how what we think impacts how we behave and then of course how we behave impacts how we think and how we behave impacts how we feel. So, for example, in the example that I just gave where if you don’t feel like exercising and you get up and you do it anyway, you probably will feel better afterwards and feel more energized.
Now to change how you feel, that’s the trick that you need to master. There are at a lot of videos on social media and on YouTube that I’ve been looking at about therapy and it seem like these days it’s just very popular to say that what you think creates your world how do you behave creates how you feel and it’s only sort of true but that’s only half of what CBT encompasses.
CBT is focused on what we think and how we act as they both create how we feel, so let me give you an example of how this might work for somebody who has depression. In general, people with depression have incredibly negative self talk. They will talk to themselves in a way they would never talk to a friend and if you’re doing that it’s very helpful to be aware of it so you can gradually change your self talk to be more positive and compassionate. Imagine someone who is depressed and can’t get off the couch and lays on the couch all day, maybe eats an entire bag of potato chips and salsa earlier in the day and then ends up feeling worse and worse.
Then because they feel awful, they probably don’t get off the couch and the whole thing just spirals downward. The behaviors contribute to the thoughts, the thoughts contribute to the feelings, and it goes around and around and around. An example of how this might work for anxiety, think of your boss being sharp with you and you have a lot of anxiety you might immediately start saying, “I’ll be homeless if I lose this job…” and within about 30 seconds you’re on the street and your body is completely activated and you are feeling emotionally stressed and anxious, your thoughts are getting more anxious, you’re probably shutting down more and more, and this creates even more anxiety.
This may lead to you avoiding certain tasks or people because anxiety is so bad that you actually don’t do any work for the rest of the day. This might lead to you getting into trouble at your job. I’ve had several patients say, “I don’t like how I feel. Help me change how.” I feel that talk therapy can be very difficult if not impossible to directly change your feelings. So, to change your feelings, you need to either change how you think or change how you behave.
Try to focus on where we can change cognition patterns or patterns of thinking. Think about what patterns of thinking and behaving are incredibly unhelpful or destructive. We call these negative patterns of thinking and behaving toxic as they are usually pretty distorted. Then we also look at what changes can we make in behavior? One of the tools commonly used in cognitive behavioral therapy is called a thought journal. This can be extremely helpful as you can reflect and journal what thoughts led to certain behaviors and what behaviors led to certain thoughts throughout the day and in various situations.
I want to take a moment to talk about unhealthy behaviors. So unhealthy behaviors typically fall into the category of compulsive behaviors or avoidant behaviors. Compulsive behaviors can be working too much, overeating, drinking too much, and avoidant behaviors could be not driving if you’re afraid of driving, not socializing if you have social anxiety, or isolating if you’re depressed, procrastinating if you have fear. Some of the things that you’re doing right or saying right now are heavily contributing to how you feel.
Everything that you think and do becomes either an affirmation or a trigger for cellular memory. When we feel a heavy emotion, our cells store this negative energy. When we feel frightened, stressed or nervous, our cells store this energy. Our cells remember everything that we say and do. Therefore, we need to choose our words and actions very carefully. Don’t sit around saying, “I wish I were different, or I hate my life.” These words are stored in our cells and our cells regenerate these feelings.
Try using affirmations to gently change what is happening within your cells. Try pushing yourself to do something that once made you happy to gently change what is being programmed in your cells. In taking action through words and behavior modification, you will gently create the change necessary within your mind and body for long-lasting change. This is how I like to use CBT in my therapy practice. If there isn’t action behind your words, nothing will change.
Reinforcing fear increases anxiety and this can also increase depression symptoms. Calming behaviors throughout your daily routine can greatly help to reduce, even eliminate, anxiety and depression symptoms. Calm and healthy behaviors that can be added throughout the day or when anxiety heightens are going for a walk with a friend, taking a cold shower, meditating, or spending time with a have a pet.
All of these can make you feel better for a second, minute, or even all day if you sprinkle in these calming/happy things in throughout your day. You can complete a daily log or journal to write out the facts of what happens in various situations, your feelings within various situations, your emotional and physical needs and wants, and then label them on a scale of 0 to 10. Try to be specific if writing things out but use bullet points so that you don’t feel that you have to write a journal entry but rather a reflection journal about your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
When reflecting, if you notice specific thoughts, self-talk, or reactions to issues or people, try to focus on how you can redirect your thoughts throughout the day. What could you say in those moments to yourself that would make you feel better? What affirmations have you tried that has helped in the past? Maybe store those in the notes in your phone so that you can have something visual to look at in times when you are stressed, triggered, sad or anxious. Now think about how you can reframe certain situations that have happened in the past?
Think about what the neutral fact is within the situation and what your reaction to the situation was. What would you say to a friend in this situation? Try to say the same things to yourself. This is the practice of self-compassion. Now think about some alternative behaviors that might be more adaptive and help you feel better during the situation.
Try to write down all of the coping techniques that you think would help in this situation so that if you are triggered again you can pull up the notes in your phone and have redirection techniques and affirmations that will help to pull you out of the negative thinking pattern. The more that you are able to redirect and reframe, the more your emotional brain focuses on the things that help you to feel better.
So even if you’re not feeling better when you initiate these changes you are creating new patterns of thinking and behaving and eventually, they will be stored in your subconscious. What many people don’t understand is that you are likely driven by your feelings, we make ourselves want to do something that we don’t want to, however, if we make ourselves do things anyway, we can create new muscle memory and new patterns in cognition. Having anxiety and depression is very limiting and sometime exposure therapy is the best thing that can move us through the negative thoughts and feelings to more happy and hopeful feelings.
After a while you won’t have to make yourself do things anymore but rather you will want to do the things that make you happy and this change will come with little to no resistance. One important takeaway of this message is that your behavior is that initiating positive healthy behaviors that help you feel better is a very big part of CBT. You can’t simply talk your way to happiness, there has to be action behind your words.
People thrive in environments that help them meet their innate emotional and physical needs. As humans we have an emotional desire to fulfill certain needs within us and within our daily lives and when we don’t fill those needs, that is when mental health disorders can creep in. Mental health disorders such as anxiety and depression. When we are not able to fulfill these needs, we unavoidably suffer. Taking action is extremely important to meeting our needs.
Anxiety is a signal that you are not meeting your needs in some way. Depression is also a signal that you are not meeting your needs in some way. How we make sense of what is happening around us in our world can also either create mental illness or challenge us to thrive within choppy waters. It is often easier to change feelings than it is thoughts. Emotions are a fundamental necessity for humans and imperative for human physical survival. A change in our thoughts is a natural consequence of a change in our emotional responses. For PTSD and trauma, and phobias, it’s not faulty thinking that’s the problem but it is necessary to come feelings as you institute change.
Three ways to take back control and CBT are:
Focus on how the feelings will change. Feelings are fluid and inevitably will change. When you’re feeling nervous about something it is a gauge as to how you are feeling and responding to a certain situation. This is a great way to note when you are feeling better about a situation. So, notice what you do that tells your mind that you feel better about a situation so that you know the beginning feelings and indications of when anxiety begins to call.
Chew it over and act normal. Anxiety is a real survival response. This is a response that can go wrong sometimes because it can hinder more than it helps. It may feel like it’s helping by protecting you, but it can actually keep you from overcoming certain situations or fears. One way to train anxiety to be hey of itself is to give it feedback to let it know that it is not needed right now because anxiety can hold us back from certain things rather than helping us move through fear us.
Then you’re telling the fear response within their amygdala that there is not a real threat that it is simply miss guided survival response. So, I encourage you to ask normal during high anxiety times to turn off the anxiety response quickly. Simply knowing that you can do this gives you a sense of control back and a sense of confidence. Anxiety is all about anticipation to what is coming.
Catch the underlying assumption and chase down the logical solutions. So, if someone feels anxious about something it’s because they have a fear of some consequence. It might be a fear of meeting new people, being embarrassed, or not being liked. The real question is how will you deal with that? Remember that people in your past have liked you and that you have been in this situation before, but you have overcome it. So, finding contradictions to the fear you are currently feeling will help you to move through the anxiety. This can simply be a step to something positive as you are constantly learning more about yourself and that you can not only survive but thrive in these difficult situations.
Strong feelings shape thoughts, not the other way around. We can lift feelings so that thoughts align more. Working to reframe thoughts can be really useful. We can help people remember that feelings always change and focus on how they expect the current feelings to change. You can try this and you can teach your children to alter their feedback so that what they are saying to their sympathetic nervous system this change is for the better, and this will take time so don’t give up but rather think of it as a challenge and a push through feelings of doubt or uncertainty and know that change is possible.
We just have to change the patterns of thinking, it’s really that simple. Enables clients to catch underlying assumptions and follow the underlying solutions and think about how they can thrive even if the so-called worst were to happen.