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Feeling distressed, in some cases, may distort one’s perception of reality. CBT aims to identify harmful thoughts, assess whether they are an accurate depiction of reality, and, if they are not, employ strategies to challenge and overcome them. The aim of cognitive therapy is to change the way you think about an issue that’s causing concern. Some counsellors may predominantly use CBT, while others may use techniques or skills from CBT along with approaches from other models of therapy too.

How can I find a therapist?

British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies – Provides information on CBT and a list of accredited CBT therapists. CBT works as well as antidepressants for treating many forms of depression. It may work slightly better than antidepressants in treating anxiety. CBT has longer lasting effects than medication, helping you to stay well in the future. This is more likely to happen early on in treatment, if you are depressed, or if CBT is not delivered face to face with a therapist. B stands for ‘behaviour’ (what you do) – Your behaviour is what you do and how you act.

Understanding how thoughts, feelings, and behaviours influence each other is crucial in CBT. The therapist provides psychoeducation to explain these links, helping the client gain insight into how their thoughts may be impacting their emotional wellbeing. CBT seeks to break the cycles of negative thinking and behaviour by equipping individuals with the practical skills to address and alter maladaptive thinking patterns and behaviours. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is a type of talking therapy where a therapist helps you to change how you think and act. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, or CBT, is a form of talking therapy.

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Educating patients with the techniques and strategies of this approach will help them in handling future situations. Equipping patients with these tools give CBT the power for self-motivated emotional and psychological healing. CBT is more than just talking about problems — it’s about developing concrete strategies to address them. One foundational technique is cognitive restructuring, which involves identifying automatic negative thoughts, evaluating their accuracy, and replacing them with more balanced ones.

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If you’re interested in a deeper exploration of various therapeutic approaches and how they can be applied, consider our psychotherapy and counselling courses. These programmes offer comprehensive education and hands-on training, empowering you to understand and support the diverse needs of individuals in a meaningful way. CBT is primarily focused on addressing current thoughts and behaviours, with an emphasis on symptom relief in the present moment. While this approach is highly effective for many, it does not typically explore the childhood or early life experiences that may contribute to present difficulties. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy CBT-I targets the thoughts and behaviours that contribute to sleep difficulties. It incorporates strategies such as improving sleep hygiene, implementing relaxation techniques, and modifying unhelpful beliefs about sleep to enhance overall sleep quality.

If these nodes are inter-related, it means that making a change in one area can cascade into changes in other areas. For example, people who experience panic attacks often interpret normal body sensations in catastrophic ways. These ‘mistakes’ in interpretation lead to powerful and rapidly escalating feelings of anxiety.

If symptoms persist following the initial sessions, additional therapy might be recommended. Overall, CBT represents a collaborative, practical process aimed at empowering people to manage and overcome difficulties effectively. Given that CBT is one of the most extensively researched and widely practiced forms of therapy, many of these people likely benefited from CBT-based interventions or techniques 3. The prevalence of CBT in mental health treatment is reflected in recent statistics. This might involve more practice with skills you learn in therapy, such as replacing self-criticizing thoughts with compassionate ones or keeping track of unhelpful thoughts in a journal.

You might have escaped a frightening situation with the (intended) consequence that you felt safer. But perhaps some unintended consequences were that you learned that it feels good to escape and escaping became your ‘go to’ strategy for handling tricky situations. Therapists who use CBT are trained to pay particular attention to any sequences that appear to get stuck in a loop or jammed (where an action feeds back to cause more of the problem). To learn more about the ways in which people’s thinking can become biased read our Psychology Tools guide to unhelpful thinking styles. An example of selective abstraction would be receiving a ‘B+’ grade on a piece of schoolwork, paying particular attention to a comment about how it could be improved, and thinking “I did badly”.

Medical tools and resources

When we don’t maintain healthy emotional boundaries with others, we may feel resentful, guilty, and drained, which are all common emotional signs of codependency or enmeshment. Addiction recovery is more successful when the addicted person understands how their feelings and actions affect their emotional distress, and how that can lead to substance abuse. We have numerous resources available for therapists wishing to adopt tools and techniques from CBT to help their clients.

• Over the past few decades thousands of such studies have examined CBT and researchers can now combine the results of these RCTs into ‘meta-analyses’ to show, in even more reliable ways, which treatments work.
• With some forms of CBT, such as exposure therapy, you may need to face situations you’d rather avoid, such as airplanes if you have a fear of flying.
• As you go through the therapy process, your therapist may ask you to do homework.

CBT is intended as a long-term solution, and it is designed to adapt your ways of thinking. Throughout your therapy, and once you’ve finished the sessions, you will aim to reinforce new thought patterns to maintain and continue with your progress. Sometimes you might need to talk through something from the past and other times you might just want to learn some better coping mechanisms.