5 Ways Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) Can Help With Depression
Depression can be a debilitating condition that impacts every area of your life. It can leave you feeling fatigued, sad, hopeless, and uninspired. If you are struggling with depression, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) may be able to help. CBT is a type of therapy that focuses on changing the way you think and behave. It has been shown to be an effective treatment for depression. In this post, I will discuss 5 ways that CBT can help with depression.
If you are struggling with depression, CBT can help you:
- Understand your thoughts and emotions
- Identify negative thinking patterns
- Challenge negative beliefs
- Develop coping skills
- Improve your mood
Most people go through life without being aware of the thoughts going through their heads. This can be problematic because left unchecked, our brains can go down all sorts of unhelpful rabbit holes. Our brains are hardwired to focus on negative things in our environment, so if we are on auto-pilot, we will most likely negatively impact our mental health. CBT helps us to understand our lives by showing how our thoughts and emotions can impact our mood and behavior. For example, if you are feeling down, CBT can help you to understand thoughts such as “I am a failure,” or “Nothing can help me in this situation.” Can contribute to feelings of depression. Once you understand that your thoughts aren’t helping the situation, you can work to change your thoughts.
Negative thinking patterns are a common occurrence in people with depression. CBT can help you to identify these patterns and work to change them. For example, if you tend to catastrophize, CBT can help you to understand that your thoughts may not be accurate. Catastrophizing is when we take one negative event and blow it out of proportion, making it into the biggest “catastrophe” there is. Catastrophizing is an example of a negative thinking pattern that can derail our interpersonal relationships and contribute to depression.
Once a negative thinking pattern is identified, we can begin to challenge those beliefs. We can ask ourselves questions to bring more rationality to our thoughts. “Am I REALLY a failure?” or “Do I REALLY deserve this treatment?” With a calmer mind, we can approach these questions with impartiality and conclude that our interpretation may not be as correct as we thought.
One of the ways to stop negative thinking patterns before they take hold is to develop coping skills. CBT can help you to develop coping skills such as deep breathing or progressive muscle relaxation. These skills can help to reduce the impact of stress on your life and improve your mood.
Similar to anxiety, depression can be a very difficult challenge to go through. However, the skills learned through CBT could help mitigate the symptoms by helping you to understand your thoughts and emotions, identify negative thinking patterns, challenge negative beliefs, and develop coping skills to improve your mood. If you think CBT can help with your symptoms, make sure to ask your therapist about using this approach.
