In this page, you can find posts regarding automatic thoughts.
Living with a chronic disease means constantly managing recurring symptoms and adapting to a new, often unwelcome, reality. This requires not just physical, but also psychological and emotional adjustment. In fact, coping with this new condition often becomes even more important than coping with the physical symptoms themselves. Research shows that automatic thoughts accompanying chronic…
Many of us want to lose weight from time to time, but when the process does not go as expected, we become frustrated and start believing that we will fail. Focusing on this thought rather than our goal often makes the process more difficult than it already is. Let’s see how someone who thinks, “I…
Many of us are constantly on the go, to the point where we can’t truly rest except when we sleep. Yet, there’s that inner voice saying, “You should be doing more.” But how helpful is the belief that we must do a lot to earn the right to rest? Let’s take a closer look. Here…
When we feel anxious, we have certain automatic thoughts more frequently. If you have noticed, our thoughts during anxiety will usually fit into this formula: Also, when we are anxious, due to intense feelings of fear, we see the world in a biased way, and believe these unhelpful thoughts more easily. This is called cognitive…
Thousands of thoughts pass through the mind during a day. However, only some of these catch our attention while most cannot make their way into our consciousness. Moreover, we stay focused on some thoughts more when compared to others. Then, is it random that some thoughts are more prominent or is there any decision mechanism…
Decades of research have shown that there is an area in the left-hemisphere of our brains that constantly makes up stories about anything and everything! The pioneer of the research, neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga and his colleagues call it “the interpreter”. They discovered the interpreter while they were working with patients so called “split-brain patients”. As…
Cognitive distortions is a concept from cognitive behavioral therapy, which implies that we usually tend to think in some biased way. Normally, having cognitive distortions is neither a deficit nor a disorder, but it is just a by-product of how our brains work. Our brains are programmed in such a way that when it tries…
In this post, I will try to tell you about what automatic thoughts are and how to identify them. Sometimes, all of a sudden, we find ourselves feeling depressed, anxious, furious, guilty… However, we can’t tell why. If someone asks, we can’t answer. Our mind is blank: “I don’t know, I just don’t feel well today.”…
In one of our previous posts, we examined What Automatic Thoughts are and How to Identify Them Using CBT Techniques. In this post, I will try to tell you about how to challenge automatic thoughts in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. You might have identified more than one automatic thought that you would like to work on….