5 CBT Techniques to Change Your Thinking Habit
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a type of psychotherapy that is used to treat different mental health conditions. It’s based on the idea that thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are all connected. CBT helps people identify negative and unhelpful thoughts and behaviors and how they can change these into ones that are more helpful and sustainable. CBT has been shown to help with a wide range of mental health problems including anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
However, there are many ways in which CBT can be used in self-help and as a self-coaching tool. One way is by identifying the root cause of the problem and then working on ways to change it. This often shows up in the form of a so-called “core-belief” that is underlying other negative or unhelpful thoughts and behaviors. Another way is by instantly identifying negative thoughts or self-sabotaging behaviors and replacing them with positive ones.
Disclaimer: Please seek psychiatric or medical help if your day-to-day life is impacted (even if not severely) by depression, anxiety, or any other mental health condition. Self-help and self-coaching is not meant to be a substitute for professional help.
The 5 Techniques
The following are five steps you can take in order to implement CBT techniques in your everyday life as a self-coaching tool and self-help practice:
1) Identify the triggers for your negative emotions and thoughts.
Here, a trigger may be a situation, object, or thought that can cause you to have a negative emotion. There are many possible triggers that might be impacting your life, and you are essentially the expert on what those are, since you’re the experiencing subject having them. Some common examples might be the things on your to-do list, an unfulfilling job, other people’s behavior towards you, and specific events that caused you to think and feel a certain way. Thoughts and feelings are connected and one may feed on the other. It’s therefore important that you identify what constitute the trigger, the thought, and the feeling, how they relate to each other, and what self-sabotaging behavior they generate in you. Always make sure to not over-identify with any of these: you’re not your thoughts and emotions, you’re having them. However, this doesn’t mean that you now aren’t accountable, quite the opposite.
2) Learn how to respond to these triggers in a more productive way.
Once you have identified your triggers and what thoughts, feelings, and behavior they elicit, the next step is to learn how to respond to them in a more productive way in order to lessen, and ultimately, obliterate their impact. In other words, you’ll want to get a better understanding of why your negative and disempowering thoughts keep coming back and what you can do to cope. Some common examples might be: “I’m such a failure” becomes “Everyone has bad days.” An even more powerful way to initially distance oneself from a disempowering thought is to find ways to emphasize their inaccuracy or biased nature. For example, “I noticed that I had a thought that I’m such a failure, but I know that everyone has bad days sometimes.”
3) Practice new responses until they become automatic.
Automatic Thought Replacement (ATR) is a technique that is used to stop obsessive or unhelpful thoughts. The person who is doing the ATR process imagines themselves in the situation where they are having negative thoughts. They then replace those thoughts with new ones, which are more positive and realistic. The new thought should be something that would make you feel better about yourself or something that prompts you to take more helpful action.
You can even frame the new thought in the form of a question. Let’s say that you get the anxious thought: “This won’t work out well.” Then you may ask yourself something like, “What will I do if it doesn’t work out? How will I feel about it after a couple of days, months, or years?” Not only have you prompted yourself to think of alternative actionable steps in case something actually did happen, you have also put this “worst-case-scenario” into the larger perspective of your life, and the issue might turn out to be smaller and less significant when you look at the bigger picture.
Self-talk is important. Therefore, replace a negative and disempowering thought with one to three new positive, compassionate, or empowering thoughts. Positive self-talk is not about forcing a positive emotion in an instance, or running away from “bad” emotions, it’s about creating and reinforcing new thinking habits that serves you better in the long run. It’s also not about obsessively monitoring your thoughts 24/7.
4) Don’t change your environment so you’re less likely to face the same triggers again.
Please note that this doesn’t apply to PTSD and other serious mental health conditions, where such exposures should take place with the support and guidance of a medical professional.
Avoidance doesn’t always serve you well, unless the situation or environment is unsafe or unsustainable in any shape or form. And in which case, please be safe and well! When I was dealing with work-related anxiety during my PhD-studies, my therapist encouraged me to face my trigger (in this case, my dissertation), even when my brain was pleading me to run away. This technique is also known as “behavioral experiment” and is a way to not only expose yourself to your trigger, but also challenge the accuracy of your belief or thought around it. Depending on the issue at hand, you might be able to prove your limiting belief or thought about something wrong, and in turn, lessen the impact of the trigger to the extent that it no longer triggers you!
5) Be patient with yourself and keep practicing!
Some thinking habits and self-sabotaging behaviors might be easier to work on than others, and some might require more time than others before you can considered them “fixed.” Begin small and work your way up may be a good strategy to avoid getting overwhelmed. Also, work on one issue at the time, instead of trying to fix everything at once. It’s crucial to remember that self-development and healing is a process, and you may have days or moments where you fall back into old thinking habits. However, practice makes progress. The key is consistency and the exercise of patience and self-compassion to the best of your ability.
Key Take Away
In an everyday practice of CBT techniques, I believe that the most important thing to remember is that thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are all connected. As a self-coaching tool, CBT can help you to distance yourself a bit and pin-point your trigger, feeling, and behavior in a given situation or circumstance. From there, you’re able to evaluate whether or not your thoughts and behaviors serve you. If you find that they don’t, then you have the ability to change those patterns into new ones that actually do serve you better. If you consistently reinforce the new patterns long enough, you’ve created a new habit for yourself.
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