Key Terms in CBT

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) has many key terms. While your therapist will explain them to you in session, this blog will outline some common terms they might use. Please see our previous blog ‘What is CBT’ for more introductory information about CBT.

Activity scheduling: Setting a time to participate in behaviours that will improve your wellbeing. For example, you might set 5:15pm-5:45pm to go for a walk on Tuesdays and Fridays, or 6pm-6:15pm on Mondays to call a friend. This will often start off with small and specific schedules, and slowly, over time, build up to include more behaviours or activities.

Automatic thoughts: Often negative, unintentional thoughts that influence behaviours and emotions. For example, you might arrive to work on the day of a big presentation and think “I am going to mess up my presentation” even if there is no evidence to suggest this.

Behavioural activation: Identifying a behaviour (or behaviours) that you want to engage in to improve your wellbeing. After identifying these behaviours, you will then engage in activity scheduling.

Behavioural experiments: Used to test or challenge the validity of automatic thoughts and core beliefs. This process provide evidence that contradicts the automatic thoughts and core beliefs.

Core beliefs: Deeply held beliefs that influence how people perceive and interpret their experiences. Often these beliefs are formed in early life, CBT focuses on unhelpful core beliefs. This is similar to the concept of schemas in schema therapy.

Cognitive distortions: Misleading ways or patterns of thinking (also known as unhelpful thinking styles) that often reinforce negative emotions, feelings, or behaviours. Some examples are:

• All-or-nothing thinking: thinking in extremes or “black and whites”, for example, “if I am not a success then I am a failure” but not being able to think in between.
• Catastrophising: imagining the worst possible outcome of an event or situation, even when there is no evidence to suggest this. For example, “I am going to do poorly on my presentation and my boss will fire me”.
• Mental filter: focussing only on the negative, filtering out the positive. For example, “my boss rated one aspect of my report poorly, therefore I am bad at report writing”, despite your boss rating you highly on many other parts of your report.
• Mind reading: thinking you can read other people’s minds, often assuming they are thinking negatively of you, e.g., “my boss thinks I am not suited to this job”.

Cognitive restructuring: Identifying unhelpful thoughts such as negative automatic thoughts or core beliefs and restructuring (or replacing/reappraising) them to be more positive. This may look like thinking “I am a failure” → “I am struggling with this task” → “I can/ I need to allocate more time to this task to ensure I get it right”.

Exposure therapy: Similar to activity scheduling after determining what behaviours you would like to engage in. This most often used for those with anxiety disorders and may be done in a controlled environment (such as in the therapy room) to gradually increase exposure to the something that is stressful for you. Overtime, the goal of exposure therapy is to change your behaviour when you are exposed to the stressful situation.

Mindfulness: Being aware of the present moment without judgement. This is used in CBT to assist people to be more in tune with their thoughts and feelings, without being “caught up” in them. This allows them to respond in a calmer and more thoughtful manner, rather than acting automatically.

Thought record: This is used to identify automatic thoughts and unhelpful thinking styles and can help in identifying core beliefs. When first recording such thoughts, your therapist will likely ask you to record what was happening when you had the thought, and the emotions you experienced. You will then collaboratively work with your therapist to identify a more adaptive or preferred alternative response and record your thoughts and emotions to determine how appropriate this new response is for you.

You can find out more about CBT here https://beckinstitute.org/