Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Dummies

CBT involves identifying thoughts, beliefs, and meanings that are activated when you’re feeling emotionally disturbed. If you assign less extreme, more helpful, more accurate meanings to negative events, you are likely to experience less extreme, less disturbing emotional and behavioural responses

The main point is to be able to analyse your thoughts and behaviours, and to take notice of where your attention is focused

Concentration exercise: Taking a walk
For this exercise, walk through a park, paying attention to what you hear, see, feel, and smell. Focus your attention for a few minutes on different aspects of the world around you. First, focus your attention mainly to what you can hear. Then shift your attention to focus on smells, and then on to the feel of your feet on the ground, and so on

Task concentration involves paying less attention to what’s going on inside of you and more attention to what’s happening outside of you

For the most part, your thoughts, no matter how distressing and negative, are not the real problem. Rather, the importance or meaning you attach to those thoughts is what causes you the problem

A crucial step in CBT is to make the thought–feeling link or B-to-C connection; that is, seeing clearly for yourself the connection between what goes through your mind and your resulting emotions. When you see this connection, it can help you to make much more sense of why to challenge and change your thoughts.

become aware of patterns or themes in the kinds of situations or events that trigger your negative thoughts. These can also help you to focus on the areas in which your thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes need most work

Figuring out which thinking errors you tend to make the most can be a useful way of making your CBT self-help more efficient and effective. The simplest way of doing this is to jot down your thoughts whenever you feel upset and note what was happening at the time

Telling yourself you can’t stand something has two effects. First, it leads you to focus more on the discomfort you’re experiencing. Second, it leads you to underestimate your ability to cope with discomfort

If you only ever take in information that fits with the way you think, you can very easily end up thinking the same way. The fact that you don’t see the positive stuff about yourself, or your experiences, doesn’t mean it isn’t there