CBT Workbook For Dummies Cheat Sheet

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) involves many helpful principles, practices and alternative perspectives that can change how you see yourself and your world for the better. In addition to aiding recognized conditions, CBT can help you to transform how you feel about yourself generally. You can become more forward-thinking and constructive when it comes to past, present and future.

What is cognitive behavioral therapy?

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a popular and evidence-based option for people who want to increase their self-confidence and move away from self-destructive behavior. This list sums up some of CBT's many features and effects:

• CBT helps you develop flexible, self-enhancing beliefs and attitudes toward yourself, others, and the world around you.
• CBT is goal-directed.
• CBT offers skills and strategies for overcoming common problems such as anxiety, depression, obsessional problems, and more.
• CBT addresses your past with a view to understanding how your personal history may be affecting your present-day beliefs and behaviors.
• CBT focuses on how your problems are being perpetuated instead of searching for a singular reason or root cause, with a particular emphasis on patterns in your thinking and behavior.
• CBT encourages you to try things out for yourself and practice new alternative ways of thinking and acting.
• CBT emphasizes the importance of preventing relapse and continuing personal development and growth.

Dealing with unhelpful thinking patterns through cognitive behavioral therapy

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has all sorts of tools for helping you help yourself. Remembering this simple A-B-C structure can help you to understand and overcome your negative thinking and start to deal with it constructively:

• A is for activating events. These are situations in the past, present, or future that trigger your thoughts and beliefs.
• B is for belief. It represents your thoughts and beliefs and includes the meanings you attach to your trigger and how you think about yourself in relation to the trigger. Your beliefs establish how you ultimately feel and act in response to your trigger.
• C is for the consequences of your behaviors and emotions. They’re what you do and feel in response to your trigger (A) because of your thoughts and beliefs (B).

How CBT can help you

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has been proven to benefit several different psychological conditions. If you suffer from any of the following problems, CBT can help you deal with them and give you greater control over your emotions:

• Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD): A condition of feeling anxious to varying degrees almost all the time. People with GAD often worry incessantly about the possibility of bad things happening to them or to their loved ones.
• Depression: Involves persistent low mood (sadness, emptiness, hopelessness, and sometimes irritability), fatigue, and loss of pleasure and satisfaction. It frequently affects sleep and appetite, in addition to making it harder to think clearly or concentrate. When people are depressed, they commonly view themselves as worthless and feel inappropriate guilt.
• Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD): Can take a lot of different forms but is characterized by unwelcome intrusive thoughts and a compulsion to carry out elaborate rituals aimed at preventing feared events from happening.
• Body dysmorphic disorder: A distressing preoccupation with perceived flaws in one’s appearance that can occupy the person’s mind for many hours a day and substantially interfere with a person’s social life, work, and other important areas of functioning.
• Panic attacks: Often lead people to believe that they’re having a heart attack, about to pass out, or in some cases even to die because the physical sensations are so strong. Panic attacks may occur in specific situations, or they can just seem to come out of the blue.
• Phobias: Specific fears of everyday things or situations. Phobias are called “irrational” fears because the degree of fear experienced is out of proportion to the actual threat involved. People can develop phobias of almost anything, but more common ones include agoraphobia (fear of crowded places and/or being away from familiar areas where you feel safe), claustrophobia (fear of being in a confined space), emetophobia (fear of vomiting), acrophobia (fear of heights), trypanophobia (fear of needles and injections), and zoophobia (fear of animals).
• Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): A state of anxiety resulting from a traumatic event that was life-threatening or significantly threatened a person’s physical integrity. People can develop PTSD from witnessing an event that leads them to feel extreme fear and horror. Possible examples of traumatic events leading to PTSD may include traffic accidents, robberies, natural disasters, assault, and war.

Healthy alternatives to loathsome personal labels

You can transform how you feel by changing the way you think and talk about yourself. The following table splits between negative self-deprecating labels that you may say aloud or inwardly think of yourself, and constructive healthier affirmations that you can choose to say and feel instead. Switching your words this way can help you see the positives about yourself and your life.

Setting goals for personal problem-solving

It’s important to be clear in your mind about your problems so you can target specific attainable goals in relation to them. The SPORT acronym stands for specific, positive, observable, realistic, and timed. Consider these five aspects when deciding your goals:

• Specific: Be precise about when, where, and with whom you want to feel and/or behave more constructively.
• Positive: State your goals in positive and proactive terms. What do you what to achieve or work toward? What do you want to strive to gain in your personal life?
• Observable: Consider how someone neutral could note that you’ve changed. What positive changes might you notice in your own thinking and actions?
• Realistic: Make your goals clear, concrete, and within your grasp. Focus on goals that involve changing your personal reactions to life instead of on changing other people or life events that you have very little control over.
• Timed: Create a timeframe to help you keep your goals in sight. Think about setting yourself clear times to carry out tasks along the way. Keeping a task list with spotlighted times of when to do each task can help you to actually get on with what you need to do.