Whether you have normal moderate anxiety levels or experience large amounts of stress leading to panic attacks and health problems, CBT is the number one tool for dealing with it. CBT stands for ‘cognitive behavioral therapy’ and is the preferred tool for therapists dealing with different psychological disorders.
This is partly because CBT has tremendous evidence supporting its effectiveness. But what also makes CBT so helpful is that it is portable and affordable. In addition, CBT involves teaching techniques that can be learned remotely over the internet. This means you can teach yourself the techniques and effectively control your emotions and stress responses.
How it Works
The basic idea behind CBT is that we ‘think ourselves’ into our mental states. Associations and conditioning partly affect our emotional response to stimuli, but so too does what we think.
For example, when you’re afraid of talking in public, it’s probably because you are thinking of all the things that could go wrong. You maybe think, ‘people will laugh at me,’ or ‘what if I stutter’ or ‘what if I faint?’. Considering these things – and visualizing them as we tend to do – can be enough to trigger the release of hormones or other hormones, and this then makes us panic and possibly even causes us to make those mistakes!
The trick is to change those thoughts so that you no longer believe those things will happen. And if you can do that, you can remove the fear and the response.
Cognitive Restructuring
The way you are taught to do this in CBT is through something called ‘cognitive restructuring.’ This is a set of tools you can use to ‘reprogram’ your thoughts and change your beliefs.
One example of this is something called ‘thought challenging.’ Here, you challenge the negative thoughts causing you to be stressed or afraid by looking at how realistic they are. For example, would people laugh at you if you stuttered? In all likelihood, no – they would be sympathetic. Are you likely to faint? Probably not.
Another handy tool is something called ‘hypothesis testing.’ Here you don’t just convince yourself that your fear is unlikely – you prove it to yourself to make sure you believe it.
How might you do that? One example is that you might put yourself in a situation you are afraid of and see what happens. So, in this case, that might mean giving a speech in front of people and then purposefully stuttering to see if people react badly. Just remind yourself: it doesn’t matter what they think. Now let yourself stand there and try to reduce stress. When you see no negative outcome, you’ll remove the stress entirely.
Finally, CBT also incorporates meditation, exposure therapy, and other known techniques to give you a powerful toolset for overcoming stress, phobias, and more.
