Stressed, Anxious, Angry, or Depressed? CBT Can Reshape the Way You Think

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is uniquely designed to help you identify negative thought patterns and recognize how they influence your feelings and actions. But your treatment doesn’t stop there. 

At Insight Psychiatric Services in Sunrise, Florida, Kevin Joseph, DNP, PMHNP-BC, can transform your life with CBT. He helps you overcome stress and treat mental health disorders by teaching you how to restructure your thoughts and stop reactive emotions and behaviors causing trouble in your life. 

CBT basics

CBT is an umbrella term that includes several therapies, each with a slightly different approach, but they all share similar characteristics.

This type of therapy focuses on the current problems affecting your daily life. Working together, we define a specific goal to solve a pressing emotional or behavioral challenge. 

CBT sessions are also time-limited and highly structured to reach your goal within 5-20 sessions (or slightly longer if necessary). 

CBT’s core principles

Three core principles guide all types of CBT therapy:

First principle

The first principle is that negative and distorted thoughts and inaccurate perceptions (how you view or interpret events) cause self-defeating and harmful feelings and behaviors.

Second principle

You’re not consciously aware of the flawed thoughts, yet they cause spontaneous reactions that are inappropriate, blown out of proportion, or unrelated to the current situation.

Third principle

You can learn to recognize, challenge, and change your thoughts. Cognitive distortions aren’t easy to identify because they’re ingrained. 

Here are a few examples of cognitive distortions:

• All-or-none thinking — Believing everything is right or wrong, good or bad
• Overgeneralization — Believing past experiences dictate the future
• Minimizing — Ignoring or rejecting the positives in your life
• Magnification — Dwelling on all the negatives and your perceived shortcomings
• Labeling — Using one characteristic or behavior to describe or judge the whole person
• Emotional reasoning — Judging yourself or others based on your negative emotions
• Personalization — Thinking you’re to blame even though you’re not
• Jumping to conclusions — Assuming you know a person’s thoughts (when you don’t)

During CBT, you learn to replace cognitive distortions with a realistic perspective. We teach new strategies and skills you can use to manage your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors throughout your lifetime.

Conditions that improve with CBT

We treat many mental health conditions with CBT, including:

• Anxiety
• Depression
• Bipolar disorder
• Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)
• Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
• Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

CBT also helps you overcome daily challenges like stress, low self-esteem, and anger.

How CBT reshapes your thoughts

After defining your problem and goal, we create the CBT structure using tools like worksheets or journaling, and asking you to complete a task between each session. 

We may ask you to choose an event or situation that occurs before the next session and sparks the targeted problem, like anxiety or anger. You write notes about what happened, recording your thoughts before the event, how you felt, your actions, and details about the situation.

Here’s an example to show how it works. Let’s say your friend forgot your birthday. This made you incredibly angry (you never forget their birthday, how dare they forget yours!) or triggered depression (you think they didn’t call because you’re unlikable or did something wrong).

Your negative thoughts cause a downward mental and emotional spiral. You may have such strong feelings that you engage in problematic behaviors, such as an angry outburst or even aggression like hitting a wall.

At your next session, we discuss what happened, deconstruct your thoughts, and compare them to the facts. For example, your friend might have been sick, needed to work late unexpectedly, or had a personal emergency. 

Facing the facts behind the event and stopping to consider other reasons for your friend's behavior empowers you to reshape your thoughts and prevent a negative, damaging emotional reaction.

CBT support for your mental health needs

The thoughts behind issues like anxiety, depression, and anger are more complex and subtle compared to the birthday example. But with skilled guidance from our team at Insight Psychiatric Services and some practice, you can overcome your challenges.

If you need help with difficult emotions or disruptive behaviors, request an appointment online or call the office today.