Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

What Is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy?

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) is a goal-oriented, problem-focused and structured approach to treating many psychological issues such as depression, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, relationship conflict, and psychosis. It is based on the idea that the way in which a person interprets events, situations and people influences their subsequent mood and behavior. These interpretations are based on certain beliefs, and if these beliefs are maladaptive or irrational, they will struggle with poor mood and behaviours that continue to exacerbate the issues.

Cognitive behavioural therapy is a practice that focuses on changing the automatic negative thoughts that create, contribute to, and even worsen our emotional difficulties.

CBT techniques will enable you to learn how to identify, challenge, and replace negative thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes. It will also provide you with problem-solving strategies that will help you better navigate difficult situations as they come.

 

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How Does Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Work?

Cognitive behavioural therapy is more of a present focused treatment with the goal to help client learn techniques to better manage their thought processes and negative emotions.  

CBT works by helping individuals identify and change unhelpful negative thought patterns and behaviour that contribute to the distress. This is done through a structured and goal-oriented approach.

Some of the common negative thinking patterns includes:

  • Personalizing

  • Negative filtering

  • Exaggerating

  • All-or-nothing thinking (black and white thinking)

  • Overgeneralizing

In CBT, your therapist will help you learn how to identify these ingrained negative thoughts and find the most effective strategy to deal with them.

The idea behind CBT therapy is to equip clients with enough tools and strategies that they will eventually learn how to apply them in their day-to-day life when needed. The worksheets and exercised used in CBT model are designed in such a way to make clients practice these strategies often enough to feel more confident and independent in handling their cognitive, emotional challenges over time. It’s similar to working out every day to strengthen your muscles, but this time the muscle is your brain.

Clients receiving CBT are taught strategies and exercises to apply both within and outside of therapy that make them more aware of and challenge maladaptive beliefs, with the goal of developing more adaptive beliefs that improve their mood, behavior and overall well-being.

A CBT approach includes:

  • Tracking your thoughts and feelings in response to situations during the week

  • Conducting exercises to weigh the evidence that supports or does not support a particular belief you have

  • Challenging underlying assumptions that may be maladaptive

  • Learning to define and understand an issue or event in more realistic ways

  • Understanding how past experiences influenced your thoughts and feelings

  • Trying new behaviours to see if that changes your thoughts and mood

 

Who Does Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Benefit?

Cognitive behavioral therapy is widely recognized around the world as one of the most effective and widely used therapeutic approaches. CBT is used to treat a wide range of mental health issues such as:

  • Anxiety

CBT is one of the most commonly used methods for treating anxiety disorders and the research suggests positive treatment outcomes when compared to other approaches. It can also be applied with different population or age groups ( e.g. youth, and children).   

  • Depression

CBT is perhaps one of the most commonly used approaches when it comes to treating depression. It is a structured treatment plan that offers step by step action plan suited for each client can be used to teach you how to treat depression without medication.

  • Addictions

CBT can be used to treat different types of addiction by focusing on the cognitive part of addiction and teaching clients how to better identify and change patterns of thinking that ignite the addictive behaviours and replace their thought patterns around it.

How Will I Know If Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Is for Me?

Most times when experiencing disorders like stress, anxiety, or depression we often search online for help. Trying to decide if CBT is the best treatment for you might be challenging at times.

In general, CBT is an excellent treatment option for a wide range of mental health challenges including: anxiety, depression, PTSD, eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other disorders. The interventions and strategies used in CBT is suitable for general public and your CBT therapist can also help modify certain strategies to better suit your needs. CBT is considered as one of low-risk treatment strategies.

 

How Long Does Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Last?

Even though it is difficult to give a specific number of sessions needed for each individual, but CBT is considered as one of the short-term treatment approaches. Usually, clients will report experiencing some relief of their symptoms after 4-6 sessions of therapy.  Research has shown that 10-20 sessions can provide substantial benefit for clients. However, some people may require more.

If you choose cognitive behavioural therapy, you will most likely meet with your therapist once a week. It is a time-limited treatment that lasts for five to twenty sessions. A session can last up to an hour; depending on the severity of the problem, you and your therapist can decide how many sessions you need and how long each one should last.