When you’re suffering from anxiety, it can feel like your world is spinning out of control. You might worry that there’s no way to escape the endless cycle of panic attacks and obsessive thoughts, or that you’ll never be able to face your fears or relax in social situations again.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) teaches you how to detect and change your own thought patterns so that you can face your fears without letting them rule your life. CBT may be conducted individually or with a group of people with similar problems. But the goal is the same: to calm your mind, lower your anxiety levels, and overcome your fears.
What is CBT?
CBT is a type of therapy that focuses on helping you change the way you think about and respond to anxiety-provoking situations. In other words, CBT can help you change how you approach a situation.
When you experience negative feelings and anxious thoughts about a certain situation, over time it can start to affect your behavior toward it. A teen who keeps having negative feelings about going to school may start to come up with excuses not to go. And as time goes on, these behaviors start to become repeating patterns.
When you have anxiety, the negative thought patterns and emotions dominate the positive ones. Feelings of unworthiness and fear can start to kick in and take over. The main goal of CBT is to work on changing the way you think, and by doing this, you can change how you feel about a situation.
Cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety
Anxiety is the most common mental health condition in the United States, but according to the Anxiety & Depression Association of America, only about 37 percent of people receive treatment.
While anxiety can be debilitating, there are treatments available that can help. One treatment option that has been proven to be effective is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). CBT can help you to identify and challenge unhelpful thoughts and beliefs that contribute to your anxiety.
It can also teach you coping and problem-solving skills to help you manage anxiety-inducing situations. If you’re struggling with anxiety, CBT may be a good treatment option for you.
Treating anxiety disorders with therapy
It’s okay to feel anxious as it is a normal response to stress, but it can become a problem if it starts to interfere with your daily life. If you find yourself avoiding situations or activities that trigger anxiety or it is causing problems at work, school, or in your personal relationships, it may be time to seek psychological treatment.
Thankfully, there are many effective options for how to calm anxiety and treat it. Therapy is often the most successful form of treatment, as it addresses the underlying causes of anxiety and teaches patients how to manage their symptoms. Contrary to popular belief, anxiety is not simply a case of nerves or being “worrywart.”
While medication can be helpful for some people, it is not the only or necessarily the most effective treatment for anxiety. In many cases, therapy is the best option for treating anxiety.
Challenging Negative Thoughts
There are helpful and unhelpful ways of reacting to a situation, often determined by how you think about them. For example, if you’ve had a miscarriage, you might think you’ve failed and that you’re not capable of being a mother.
This could lead to you feeling lonely, hopeless, depressed, and tired, so you stop trying and give up on conceiving. You become trapped in a negative cycle when you could rather accept this way of thinking that miscarriages do happen, learn from your mistakes and move on, and feel optimistic about the future.
This is a simplified illustration, but it shows how certain views, emotions, physical sensations, and behaviors can keep you in a downward spiral and even bring about new circumstances that make you feel worse about yourself.
CBT aims to stop negative cycles such as these by understanding things that make you feel bad, anxious, or afraid. CBT can help you in changing your negative thought patterns and boost your mood by helping you make your problems more manageable.
Exposure Therapy/ Systematic Desensitization
The primary thought behind exposure therapy is to face your fears. When someone exposes themselves to the source of their anxieties and nothing bad happens, the anxiety decreases.
Your therapist may ask you to visualize the frightening situation, or you may confront it in real life, as part of the exposure process. Exposure therapy may be used alone, or it may be conducted as part of cognitive behavioral therapy.
Exposure therapy typically begins with a situation that is just mildly threatening. The treatment then works up from then on rather than forcing you to confront your biggest fear right away, which can be distressing. Systematic desensitization allows you to gradually challenge your fears, build confidence, and master skills for controlling panic.
Relaxation Skills
Relaxation techniques ease tension and improve your ability to think properly. In turn, these can help you take back control of a situation. Some of these techniques include deep breathing exercises, progressive muscle relaxation, and meditation.
There are a lot of other different ways to relax. Choose the ones that appeal to you, such as reading a book on a rainy day or going to a mental health retreat. Like any new skill, relaxation takes time and practice to master. The more you practice, the easier it is to relax and the easier it is to stay relaxed in stressful situations.
CBT for Specific Disorders
There are variations of CBT for all kinds of mental health problems, from anxiety to depression to chronic posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). For instance, cognitive processing therapy (CPT) for PTSD claims that faulty beliefs about the causes or consequences of a traumatic event prevent the patient from processing the emotions surrounding the memory.
However, not everyone who benefits from CBT has a mental health condition. CBT can also be an effective tool to help anyone learn how to better manage stressful life situations.
CBT differs from any other psychotherapies because it’s pragmatic. It is highly structured and often manualized since it’s based on core principles such as unfaulty or unhelpful ways of thinking, or learned negative patterns of unhelpful behavior. In some cases, cognitive therapy techniques are most effective when they’re combined with other treatments, such as antidepressants or other medications.
Generalized Anxiety Disorder
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For individuals with generalized anxiety disorder, negative ways of thinking fuel the negative emotions of anxiety and fear. Even if your problems don’t entirely consume you, there would be times when you still feel anxious for no apparent reason. Your anxiety, worry, or physical symptoms cause you significant distress in social, work, or other areas of your life.
The goal of cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety is to recognize and correct these negative thoughts and beliefs. The main idea is that if you change the way you think, you can change the way you feel. According to the American Psychiatric Association, many people improve significantly within 8 to 10 therapy sessions.
Social Anxiety Disorder
Cognitive behavioral therapy can be one of the most effective types for treating social anxiety disorder. This treatment can help you learn new coping strategies, be used to change the negative emotions that contribute to anxiety, and gradually ease the fear you experience in social situations.
To put it simply, social anxiety involves a desire for acceptance. You want people to like you and have good impressions of you after your interactions. At the same time, you hold a strong conviction that you’ll act in a way that makes you look bad and draws criticism. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for social anxiety aims to help you examine and change avoidance behaviors, self-consciousness, and physical symptoms you experience.
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
People with OCD engage in specific compulsions to experience temporary relief from obsessive thoughts. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is a process that helps break the automatic bond between an obsessive thought and compulsive behavior.
CBT trains an individual with OCD to avoid ritualizing whenever they feel anxious. In fact, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for OCD is one of the only proven methods for effectively treating the disorder. Research shows that as many as 75% of patients who seek CBT as a treatment for OCD find it to be effective in treating the disorder.
Get help from CBT therapists at Milestone
While it can be overwhelming to acknowledge and seek help for a mental health condition, it’s important that you do. At Milestone, we can help you better understand and work through the obstacles that prevent you from living a full and healthy life. Contact us and we’ll be in touch!