Overall, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is an excellent process to treat anxiety. It is a four- to six-week long process that just demands your attention.
If you have a fever, you visit the doctor; you take medicine and treat yourself. If your physical health is your priority, then why not mental health? Your brain is also an organ that demands equal attention just like any other organ of your body. Your mental health and physical health are equally important for you and need to be treated equally. People generally ignore their mental health and live their whole life worrying about disorders like anxiety, panic attack, depression, and much more.
As there are antibiotics to treat your body, so there are therapies to treat the brain. You do not have to live your whole life with anxiety or any other mental disorder.
Here is everything you should know about anxiety and how to treat it…
Anxiety, fear, panic attacks, constant worry, and all the irrational thoughts that you get can be easily treated. The best and most effective method to treat it is anxiety therapy. Anxiety therapy is much more than any other medication. Apart from treating the symptoms, this therapy does the root cause analysis of the issue you are facing and helps you develop new problem coping skills which helps to treat the disorder faster with much more ease.
Now, comes the therapy used to treat this anxiety disorder. Although there are bunches of different therapies that are used to treat anxiety, the most leading, effective, and promising one used by experts all over the globe is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is a short duration psychological treatment in the form of a talk with a trained therapist who helps you focus on your present life, leaving the past behind. It helps in giving you a direction as to how you tackle the stressful and difficult situations and how your thoughts and responses can help you ease your stress and anxiety.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is a combination of two different therapies – Cognitive therapy and Behavioural therapy.
Cognitive Therapy here helps in identifying, understanding, and interpreting how negative thoughts and emotions lead to anxiety. Whereas, Behavioural therapy helps in understanding and examining how you react and behave in those difficult situations of anxiety. In simpler words, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy works on the idea of how our thoughts, emotions, and behaviour are interconnected with each other and how changes in one affect the other two.
The basic principle of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy works on identifying and changing the negative thoughts in the person. It believes that there is a lot of energy in the thoughts of a person and if you think positively, you will react positively and this will change the way you look at the world and your life itself.
Challenge the Negativities
As described above, the goal of CBT is to drain the negative thoughts out of your mind. This process is known as Cognitive Restructuring and helps you remove the negative thoughts in your mind and replace them with more positive, encouraging, and realistic ones.
This whole Cognitive Restructuring procedure works in steps. It involves the following steps:
- Identifying the negative thoughts: This is the first step of the process. It involves identifying negative thoughts in the mind of a person. In this step, the therapist focuses on uncovering the thoughts of the person. It involves how the person feels, his views, thoughts, and an idea about himself and the challenges that he faces. People with anxiety syndrome perceive the common, small issues as life-threatening problems. So, it is important to know the thought process of the person and the way he feels when he feels anxious.
- Challenge the negative thoughts in you: Now, you have done the root cause analysis and exactly know the thoughts which are making you anxious. The second step is to challenge those negatives. In this step, the therapist helps you ask yourself the thoughts you are facing when you are anxious, your belief related to it, and the real world check of your negative thoughts. It helps you in understanding the situation about which you are worrying, the pros and cons of your thoughts, and the reality check that the problem you are worrying about will ever happen.
- Draining out the negative thoughts with realistic ones: This is the final and most important step of the process. Now, you know about your irrational thoughts and the emotions that lead to anxiety, and the negativities and constant worry about these thoughts that are never going to happen. It is now the time to remove these negative thoughts from your mind and think about reality. The thoughts that will make you feel relaxed and calm and fill you with positivity.
Overall, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is an excellent process to treat anxiety. It is a four- to six-week long process that just demands your attention. The best thing about this therapy is its cost-effective and involves no use of medications. From anxiety and panic attacks to OCD, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy helps treat almost all mental disorders.