extreme hopelessness to unrealistic optimism

You'll then be ready to move to a more difficult situation. You'll be exposed to an item or situation for a length of time and frequency recommended by your therapist.Īfter the first few times, you'll find your anxiety does not climb as high and does not last as long. In such cases, talking about the situation is not as helpful and you may need to learn to face your fears in a methodical and structured way through exposure therapy.Įxposure therapy involves starting with items and situations that cause anxiety, but anxiety that you feel able to tolerate. Exposure therapyĮxposure therapy is a form of CBT particularly useful for people with phobias or obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). By making your problems more manageable, CBT can help you change your negative thought patterns and improve the way you feel.ĬBT can help you get to a point where you can achieve this on your own and tackle problems without the help of a therapist. This is a simplified example, but it illustrates how certain thoughts, feelings, physical sensations and actions can trap you in a negative cycle and even create new situations that make you feel worse about yourself.ĬBT aims to stop negative cycles such as these by breaking down things that make you feel bad, anxious or scared. This optimism could result in you becoming more socially active and you may start evening classes and develop a new circle of friends. You become trapped in a negative cycle, sitting at home alone and feeling bad about yourself.īut rather than accepting this way of thinking you could accept that many marriages end, learn from your mistakes and move on, and feel optimistic about the future. This could lead to you feeling hopeless, lonely, depressed and tired, so you stop going out and meeting new people. There are helpful and unhelpful ways of reacting to a situation, often determined by how you think about them.įor example, if your marriage has ended in divorce, you might think you've failed and that you're not capable of having another meaningful relationship.

collaborative – your therapist will not tell you what to do they'll work with you to find solutions to your current difficulties.focused on current problems – it's mainly concerned with how you think and act now rather than attempting to resolve past issues.highly structured – rather than talking freely about your life, you and your therapist discuss specific problems and set goals for you to achieve.pragmatic – it helps identify specific problems and tries to solve them.How CBT is differentĬBT differs from many other psychotherapies because it's:

For example, your thoughts about a certain situation can often affect how you feel both physically and emotionally, as well as how you act in response. In CBT, problems are broken down into 5 main areas:ĬBT is based on the concept of these 5 areas being interconnected and affecting each other. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) can help you make sense of overwhelming problems by breaking them down into smaller parts.

Extreme hopelessness to unrealistic optimism