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 yourself 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.
Try to journal 3 positive things that you did that day, 3 positive “I am” statements, and 3 self-care tasks that you did that day. You can bullet point journal, so you don’t have to write a lot but make what you do write valuable.
Make this a fun addition to your day and something that you look forward to do rather than something that you “have” to do. After a while, you will have a book of really positive things about your days and yourself!