Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

What are the Benefits of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?

Whenever you have a sad, painful, mean, irritable, hopeless, or hateful thought, your brain releases chemicals that make you feel bad. And the way you think and feel about something or someone, including yourself, often affects what you do in response. For example, if you wave to a friend who is driving by, but that person doesn’t wave back, you might automatically conclude that they are mad at you. You immediately plan to avoid your friend in the future, rather than consider other possibilities, such as she was focused on the road and didn’t notice you.

Treatment with cognitive behavioral therapy helps to change these automatic negative thought patterns, not by replacing them with positive affirmations, but rather by challenging the thoughts and looking for any evidence that refutes them. With practice, this helps a person shift to more accurate, realistic thoughts. In turn, this can boost mood, increase motivation, improve confidence and self-control, lower stress, reduce anxiety, and help people make healthier and more productive decisions, among many other benefits.

Who Can Benefit from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?

CBT can be an appropriate therapy for reducing symptoms in numerous mental health conditions, including:

• Addictions
• Anger Issues
• Anxiety
• Depression
• Eating Disorders
• Grief or Loss
• Insomnia
• Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
• Panic Disorder
• Personality Disorders
• Phobias
• Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
• Relationship Problems
• Schizophrenia (in conjunction with medication)
• Self-Esteem Issues
• Stress
• Weight Problems

Cognitive behavioral therapy can also be helpful for managing the symptoms of physical health problems, such as chronic pain, irritable bowel syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome, and others. This type of therapy, however, may not be appropriate for individuals with certain intellectual disabilities, cognitive impairment (such as in dementia), or young children who are not mature enough to understand the concepts.

The Proven Effectiveness of CBT

Cognitive behavioral therapy has been helping people for over half a century. CBT was originally developed in the 1960s by Aaron T. Beck, MD. Through his extensive work with depressed patients, Dr. Beck noticed that many of them had negative thoughts and beliefs about themselves that were inaccurate and difficult to validate. He witnessed how the patients’ depressive symptoms were exacerbated by these cognitive distortions. Subsequently, he developed a treatment protocol to help his patients challenge their spontaneous (or automatic) negative thoughts, which in turn helped them make better, healthier behavior choices. These changes effectively reduced their depressive symptoms.

Over the last several decades, the CBT model has successfully been applied to many other types of mental health conditions as well as some medical problems that have psychological components.

In 1977, the first study comparing the efficacy of cognitive behavioral therapy to antidepressant treatment was published. The results found that CBT was as effective as the medication in reducing depression and was twice as good at preventing a relapse of depression symptoms. The results of this study were replicated in another clinical trial in the United Kingdom, and these outcomes brought worldwide interest to this therapeutic modality.

More than 2,000 published research studies have since found that CBT is an effective treatment for a wide range of mental health disorders and symptoms as well as managing emotional distress caused by certain medical problems.