6 minutes
Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is an evidence-based approach to treating a range of mental health challenges and conditions. If you’ve been looking into therapy, you may have come across therapists offering CBT.
In this article, we’ll walk you through the basics of CBT, including:
Scroll down to learn more.
CBT is a type of psychotherapy used to treat mental health conditions and challenges. CBT acknowledges that our thoughts, feelings, and behaviour all impact each other.
For example, if you have bad acne, you might avoid socialising. You might feel embarrassed and ashamed about your skin. You might be scared that your friends will judge your acne, so you avoid hanging out with them altogether.
This is an example of how thoughts (that you will be judged), lead to feelings (of shame and embarrassment), and then to specific behaviours (avoiding hanging out).
Equally, this behaviour (avoiding hanging out), reinforces the thought that people will judge you for your acne (because you don’t have the opportunity to prove the thought wrong), and contributes to those feelings (of shame and embarrassment).
At first, avoiding your friends offered a sense of safety. But in the long term, avoidance is an unhelpful coping strategy because it keeps harmful thoughts and behaviours going. How? By not allowing you the opportunity to prove your negative thoughts wrong.
CBT can help in this situation by either:
By using CBT, we can start to feel better by either changing our thinking, changing our habits, or changing our behaviour.
Another important aspect of CBT is the idea of the ‘negative spiral’ that can come from these linked thoughts, feelings and behaviours, and spill out into different areas of your life.
Using our above example, the negative spiral could look something like this:
These thoughts and feelings can make it even harder to break the cycle and lead you to wanting to isolate yourself even further.
Watch the below video to learn more about how CBT works and whether it might be helpful for you.
There are a range of different strategies and techniques used in cognitive behavioural therapy. A CBT therapist will work with you to find the best approach for you, which will often involve a combination of multiple strategies. Here are some examples of how they can work.
Core beliefs are the fundamental beliefs we hold about who we are, which are developed over time through our experiences. Core beliefs aren’t usually something we think about very often (or are even aware of) but they can have a big impact on our lives.
For example, if you had parents with high expectations, you may have developed the core belief that nothing you do is good enough, or that you are not good enough. This belief could have a negative impact on your life in all sorts of different situations. For example, you might:
At a subconscious level, you might fear that these things would confirm your belief that nothing you do is good enough, or you might want to avoid those feelings of ‘not being good enough’ you had in the past.
CBT based therapy can be particularly helpful in identifying what some of your unhelpful core beliefs may be, how they might be affecting you, and working on ways you can change them.
Imagine you had a phobia of spiders. To help you, your therapist might take you through small exercises, where you’d be gradually exposed to spiders one small step at a time. In the first task, you may be asked just to read about spiders, in the next, to look at pictures of spiders, and in the next, to watch a video of spiders.
When you gradually expose yourself to your fears, you learn that maybe spiders aren’t as scary as you thought. You develop more confidence each time as you start to overcome the negative thoughts and feelings that held you back before. The goal would be to work up to the point where you’re able to face spiders in reality with little to no fear.
Behavioural experiments are small exercises designed to test the accuracy of your core beliefs or negative thoughts. You and your therapist might design an experiment to challenge a belief or thought, and help replace it with a healthy alternative.
For example, you might believe that no one at work likes you, causing you to withdraw and not speak to anyone at work.
You and your therapist decide to conduct an experiment where you talk to two colleagues at work during the week. This might feel daunting, but on Monday you make the effort to start a conversation with a few people using some sentences you created together with your therapist.
They ask about your work and what you did on the weekend, and you discover a mutual interest in gaming. It might have been a bit awkward, but you realise that perhaps your colleagues don’t dislike you, it’s just that everyone’s usually pretty busy, and no one had made the effort to form a connection.
CBT therapists will work with you to understand what challenges you would like to work on, and what you would like to achieve. They will then take your circumstances into account, and use one or more different strategies to help you.
They might:
Together, they will help you find the approach that works for you. It’s ok to tell them if something feels too much - while some things may feel challenging, a good therapist will make sure you only take on what you’re ready for.
CBT treats mild mental health challenges as well as more serious conditions.
CBT can be effective for the treatment of:
Whether you have a diagnosable mental health condition or not, CBT can help you cope better with life’s challenges.
It’s important to choose a therapeutic approach that fits you. Understanding the benefits and limitations of CBT can help you decide whether you’d like to give it a try.
If you don’t like the sound of CBT, that’s okay. You don’t need to feel disheartened as there are many other approaches to choose from. A good therapist can use other strategies or point you in the right direction if CBT isn’t working for you. For example, if you're dealing with trauma, you may want to explore eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy.
CBT works well as a self-help strategy but for best results, you should consider working with a therapist. A therapist can give you extra guidance and support to break stubborn patterns or habits that may be hard to break on your own, or that you may not be aware of.
You can click below to learn:
That being said, if you’d like to test CBT out, you can try this CBT-based thought challenging activity or download a CBT app like MoodGym.
Another option is to try a CBT book such as CBT Made Simple, which gives a detailed explanation of CBT, along with strategies you can apply for yourself. There’s also CBT in 7 weeks, which is a step-by-step workbook with prompting questions and activities. Both books are written by licensed psychologist Seth Gillihan.
Your feedback helps us improve our site for people like you.
