Cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) focuses on how our thoughts and feelings affect what we do and how we handle our lives. So this type of therapy (or, more accurately, nowadays, group of therapies) examines a client's thoughts, feelings and behaviour, as well as the associations between these, in considerable detail, in order to identify any patterns or links in the chain that are working against the client's best interests and defeating them in what they want to achieve.  

 

It is now known that many human thought processes are automatic and inherently biased. For example, it is common for us to have a better memory for negative events than positive ones. This may serve a useful purpose in helping us try to avoid bad things from happening again but if we quickly forget all the good things that happen, we may end up believing that nothing positive ever happens to us, and that can affect our mood and motivation. Similarly, we can acquire certain ways of thinking about ourselves/other people/or the world in general from our experiences growing up, yet these ways of thinking may outlive their usefulness and benefit from some conscious revising later on. 

 

CBT will help you to learn about your own thought/feeling/behaviour processes, to see whether they are causing you any problems and whether there is anything you want to change. The good news is: we can change the way we think, as well as how we manage our feelings - and doing so can have a profound effect on how we experience ourselves, and how we deal with challenging situations. There is now a large body of research indicating that cognitive behavioural therapies are effective, especially for anxiety disorders and depression, but their effectiveness for other problems, too, is being demonstrated by further research.