San Francisco CBT Series: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Part 1
San Francisco CBT Series: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Part 1
Depression and anxiety have become more common experiences lately, and yet they are distressing to deal with. You’re likely reading this because you’ve heard about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and you’re looking for some solutions to your own problems. I’m a psychologist in San Francisco and everyday, I help my clients improve their thoughts, feelings, and quality of life using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. In this blog post and the next, I’ll deep dive into Cognitive Behavioral Therapy-you’ll get a better understanding of how it works and how it could help you.
You can read my previous blog to learn more about Depression and Anxiety. But to mention briefly, depression, or major depressive disorder, is a medical condition that most describe as feelings of sadness, guilt, low self-esteem, loss of interest in things a person once enjoyed, loss of energy, and much more. It often affects a person’s functioning so they are not able to be themselves in personal relationship and work productivity might suffer.
Anxiety is also a mental health condition, and people feel a sense of fear or dread approaching certain situations in their life. It can include physical sensations such as heart pounding and sweating, which can make it difficult for a person to cope in the moment.
Unfortunately, oftentimes depression and anxiety go together. It may sound strange, but a person can experience both, which is even more uncomfortable and distressing. If you’re feeling this way, you know how hard it is to function in certain situations in your life. The common thread with depression and anxiety, is that they both are affected by the way we think.
How do our thoughts affect our mood?
Our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, have a profound impact on one another. This is because thoughts trigger emotions, and our emotions guide our actions. Additionally, we tend to analyze the thoughts and feelings we have. For example, worrying about an upcoming job interview may cause fear, but we might also analyze that emotion by saying to ourselves, “this fear isn’t realistic.” How we analyze our thoughts influences how we feel. When these thoughts are negative in nature, this also influences how we feel, and these thoughts can become automatic and continuous, in that they just keeping popping up in our mind, without us consciously deciding to think these thoughts!
How does negative thinking contribute to causing and worsening depression and anxiety?
When we are feeling good and coping well with depression and anxiety, we still have negative thoughts, but we have a better balance of both negative and positive thoughts. When the balance tips too far toward negative thinking, it can trigger anxious feelings and phases of depression. That is when we experience some of the symptoms described in my previous blogs on Depression and Anxiety.
When a person is already dealing with these feelings, depression and anxiety can worsen because the negative thinking becomes a habitual. It’s important to remember, this is no one’s fault! Its not easy to fully comprehend the role thoughts play in our feelings, moods, and causing depression and anxiety to continue.
What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a treatment approach that has been found to be effective for a wide range of psychological problems. This includes depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, alcohol and drug use problems, and relationship problems. The use of CBT techniques can significantly improve a person’s functioning and quality of life, and this has been demonstrated in a number of research studies on the use and effectiveness of CBT. It has become a well-known approach to helping a person deal unpleasant feelings and when one learns the tools of CBT and how to effectively apply them, they can do so by themselves, which can be self-empowering.
Cognitive behavioral therapy involves bringing awareness to the thoughts one is thinking and noticing how they impact certain feelings and contribute to the way one behaves. In bringing awareness to these thoughts, we can start to see how these thoughts are not only unhelpful, but are also usually quite skewed, and can be dysfunctional. Oftentimes, we are not aware of the thoughts we are thinking, of the dysfunction in them. These thoughts happen almost automatically, and it can seem as if we have no control over them.
Automatic negative thoughts as the real culprit!
Automatic negative thoughts are negative thoughts that seem to pop into your mind without any conscious effort. People experiencing anxiety and depression experience a greater number or greater intensity of automatic negative thoughts. Each person’s automatic thoughts may be different from the next persons. These automatic negative thoughts are usually related to our life experiences along with our fears and negative messages we have received in our past. Over time, we internalize these messages and they become part of our automatic negative thought narrative. These thoughts are about oneself, other people, and the world. To take this a step further, automatic negative thoughts can lead to deeper beliefs, or what is called, core beliefs. With depression and anxiety, people often share similar core beliefs.
Common Automatic Negative Thoughts that lead to depression and anxiety.
A person with anxiety tends to have automatic negative thoughts about the future. They may think thoughts such as,
“They will reject me.”
“I’m going to embarrass myself.”
“If I don’t do a good job, I’ll fail and lose my job.”
“I should always be prepared for what happens.”
Notice that these thoughts reference events that haven’t happened yet. A person cannot really know what’s going to happen in their situation, and yet, their automatic negative thoughts tell them that things aren’t going to go well. Even though these thoughts often have no basis in reality or logic, a person who listens to them may avoid situations or tolerate them with high levels of anxiety and fear.
A person with depression tends to have automatic negative thoughts that focus more on the self and events in the past. They may have thoughts such as,
“I’m not a good person.”
“I don’t deserve to be happy.”
“It’s my fault that things went bad.”
“People are out to get me.”
While things may have not gone well in the past, a person perceives those events and things about themselves in such a negative way, that it leads to developing automatic negative thoughts. These types of thoughts can make a person feel helpless, hopeless, and bad about oneself.
FREE consultation call for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in San Francisco, California
I hope this helps create a clearer picture of how negative thoughts can cause and contribute to anxiety and depressive disorders. In the next part of this blog post, San Francisco CBT Series: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Part 2, we delve into the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors cycle, and how Cognitive behavioral therapy can help relieve depression and anxiety.
If you are ready to get help with depression, anxiety, relationship issues or work stress, find out more about how I can help here. If you’re looking for Cognitive Behavioral therapy in San Francisco or online therapy in California, contact me. The consultation call is free. We can talk about how changing your thought patterns can help you feel better about yourself and about life in general.
Specialties include therapy for depression, anxiety, work stress, relationships, and life changes.
In Case You Missed It! Additional blog posts in this series:
San Francisco CBT Series: Successful Goal Setting, Part 2
San Francisco CBT Series: Successful Goal Setting, Part 1
San Francisco CBT Series: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Part 2
