Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, also known as CBT for short, is a talking therapy that allows the client to improve their quality of life. How? To cut a long story short, it furnishes recipients with the ability to manage mental health conditions in a more productive way. By arming them with ways to help themselves, or recognise their own negative thought patterns, CBT can lead to those with severe mental health problems leading better lives.
Let’s talk about how getting CBT online could help you.
Emotional Disorders and Mental Ill Health Ruin Lives.
Untreated mental illnesses can cost you relationships, hold you back in life in terms of your education, or even stop you from leaving the house. Depression can place you into horrendous cycles that make suicide a very real possibility. Anxiety can prevent you from being social, getting a job, or having a successful relationship. The International Bi-Polar Foundation have a fantastic account of living with an undiagnosed, untreated mental illness.
Yet to properly treat your emotional problems or mental health issues, you need to partake in a treatment plan devised by a healthcare professional. Generally speaking, the treatment for conditions like depression or General Anxiety Disorder is twofold. You will be given medication to help you manage the symptoms – but you should also be placed into a therapy that is relevant to your specific issues.
When you can’t think straight, find yourself in a constant cycle of depression, or suffer from daily anxieties that make living a normal life difficult; CBT is a tool that can help you get back to normal. There are any variety of therapies that might help you make progress back to a calmer mind – but CBT is the only one that looks at your thought patterns and examines ways you can change them, to stop you thinking yourself into the abyss.
What Is CBT?
CBT aims to give you the tools you need to change the way you think, and therefore change the way you behave or react to life problems. When we descend into a mental health or emotional disorder, we spiral downwards. We tell ourselves we aren’t good enough, strong enough, pretty enough. Our problems compound… what starts as “He didn’t say hello this morning” ends in “He hates me because of that time ten years ago when I forgot to open his message”. Problems are compounded on top of one another, stacking like a hard drive in a cycle. We call this cyclical thinking.
The overall aim of CBT is to teach you how to interrupt this cyclical way of thinking, ultimately stopping us from overthinking and making our situation worse. Often, it is all in our heads in a very real way… well, a mental illness wouldn’t be in your foot, would it?
Through a combination of CBT talking therapy and medication someone with a mental health problem or emotional disorder can claim back control of their own thoughts. If successful, they can apply the techniques they learned to all aspects of life, making for a better, brighter future.
What’s the moral of this story? You don’t have to “just live with it”. You can get help to think clearly again. In most instances all it takes is a few clicks or a phone call – and it might just change your life.
