Discover CBT Techniques that really work
Author: John Crimmins
There are a multitude of CBT skills that offer a wide variety to suit your preferences.
These are usually used in a therapeutic setting with a therapist. But it can be just as effective to try these on your own as a great form of personal development.
The key principle behind CBT is that your thought patterns affect your emotions, which, in turn, can affect your behaviors.
For instance, CBT highlights how negative thoughts can lead to negative feelings and actions. But, if you reframe your thoughts in a more positive way, it can lead to more positive feelings and helpful behaviors.
Behavioral Experiments
Behavioral experiments are all about information gathering, the purpose of which is to test the accuracy of your beliefs about yourself and others, or to test new, more adaptive beliefs.In CBT, behavioral experiments are designed to test thoughts and then act on them. For example, you might do a behavioral experiment to test the thought, “If I criticize myself after I binge eat, I will eat less,” vs. “If I talk to myself gently after overeating, I’ll overeat less.”
To do this, you would try each approach on different occasions and monitor your subsequent eating habits. This would give you objective feedback about whether negative self talk or more positive self talk was more effective in reducing your overeating.
This type of behavioral experiment might also help counteract a (related) thought like, “If I’m kind to myself, it’s like giving myself the freedom to binge and then and I’ll lose all self-control.”
Thought Records
Like behavioral experiments, thought records are also designed to test the validity of thoughts. For example, a sales representative who gets negative feedback from a supervisor might jump to the conclusion, “I am such a bad sales person, she just thinks I am stupid. In this situation the sales rep could do a thought record evaluating the evidence for and against that thought.
Evidence against the thought might be things like, “The supervisor gave me positive feedback last week” or ” I had a record sales week a month ago, I can’t be that bad.
Once you’ve looked at the objective evidence for and against a thought you will be able to come up with more balanced thoughts to take its place. An example of a balanced thought might be, “I made a mistake; making mistakes is normal. I can learn from this. My supervisor will be impressed to see me learning from my mistakes and incorporating her feedback.”
Thought records are an excellent way to stop irrational thinking.
Behavioural experiments are a great way to stop emotional reasoning.
Emotional reasoning is a cognitive distortion where a person decides that their emotional reaction proves something is true, regardless of evidence proving otherwise. The emotions cloud your thoughts, which in turn clouds your reality.
Pleasant Activity Scheduling
Pleasant activity scheduling is a surprisingly effective cognitive behavioral therapy technique. It’s particularly helpful when dealing with depression.
Give this a go: Write the next seven days down on a piece of paper, starting with today. For each day, schedule one pleasant activity (anything you enjoy that’s not unhealthy) that you wouldn’t normally allow yourself to do. It can be anything you like, it could be as simple as putting on your headphones and taking time out to listen to your favourite music or reading a chapter of a novel.
An alternative version of this technique is to schedule one activity per day that gives you a sense of mastery, competence, or accomplishment. Again, choose something small that you wouldn’t usually do. Aim for something that will take you less than ten minutes. An advanced version of this technique would be to schedule three pleasant activities per day—one for the morning, one for the afternoon, and one for the evening.
Doing activities that produce higher levels of positive emotions in your daily life will help make your thinking less negative, narrow, rigid, and self-focused.
Situation Exposure Hierarchies
An exposure hierarchy is a list of situations that you might fear or avoid. They are graded or rank-ordered in their ability to elicit anxiety. The least anxiety-provoking situations are named at the bottom of the hierarchy while the most anxiety-provoking situations are at the top.
For example, a client with an eating disorder might make a list of “forbidden foods,” with chocolate at the top of the list and yogurt near the bottom. A client with social anxiety might put asking someone on a date at the top of his list and asking someone for directions near the bottom. The theme of the list should reflect your most pressing problem, essentially.
For each item on your list, rate how distressed you think you’d be if you did it. Use a scale from 0 to 10. For example, chocolate = 10; yogurt = 2. Order your list from highest to lowest.
Try to have several items at each distress number so there are no big jumps. The idea is to work your way through the list, from lowest to highest. You can experiment with each item several times over a period of a few days until the distress you feel about being in that situation is about half of what it was the first time you tried it (e.g., you can eat yogurt with a level of distress that’s 3 out of 10 instead of 6 out of 10). Then move to the next item up the list.
Imagery Based Exposure
Imagery (visualization) has harnessed the power of the mind for centuries. By creating images in your mind, you can reduce pain and other symptoms tied to your condition. The more specific the visualization, the more helpful it will likely be.
One version of imagery exposure involves bringing to mind a recent memory that provoked strong negative emotions. Let’s take, for instance, the earlier example of the sales rep being given critical feedback by a supervisor.
In imagery exposure, the person would bring the situation of being given the feedback to mind and remember it in lots of sensory detail (e.g., the supervisor’s tone of voice, what the room looked like). They would also attempt to accurately label the emotions and thoughts they experienced during the interaction, and what their behavioral urges were (e.g., to get defensive, to get upset or to get angry, etc.). In prolonged imagery exposure, the person would keep visualizing the image in detail until their level of distress reduced to about half its initial level (say from 8 out of 10 to 4 out of 10).
Imagery based exposure can help counteract rumination because it helps make intrusive painful memories less likely to trigger rumination.(The process of continuously thinking about the same thoughts, which tend to be sad or dark, is called rumination) . Because of this, it also tends to help reduce avoidance and procrastination. . When a person is less distressed by intrusive thoughts, images and memories, they’re able to choose healthier coping actions.
Summary
This list of cognitive behavioral therapy techniques will give you a good idea of the variety of techniques that are used in cognitive behavioral therapy. If you would like to learn more then take a look at my Course “ Take back control of your life”. You will discover amazing ways to grow personally and lead a more productive and dynamic life.