Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy is used all around the world to help people with many different problems like anxiety, depression, anger, relationship problems, substance use, accomplishing goals, and motivation.
We created a video to help people understand fundamental CBT tools and ideas to improve their lives.
Lots of people struggle with identifying their thinking. Some insist that they are “just anxious” and they have no worries creating this anxiety. While it may be the case that some health conditions can produce an anxiety like response, CBT suggests that the vast majority of the time there are thoughts or beliefs creating our emotions and there are some tools we can use to help identify them.
This is a fundamental technique in CBT. Our feelings are excellent clues into what we are thinking. Also, since we frequently misuse the word “feel” in English, sometimes our “feelings” are actually thoughts in disguise. For example, woman struggling with guilt about parenting insisted she couldn’t identify her thoughts when she felt guilty. When describing the situation in therapy she claimed “I just feel like a bad Mom.” This was immensely helpful because she had been confusing her feelings with her thoughts. She felt guilty and she thought “I’m a bad mom.”
Even when we are not confusing thoughts and feelings, our emotions give us hints about our thinking. As described above, when we are anxious we are usually worried about something, when we are depressed we are usually thinking negative thoughts about ourselves, the world, or our futures, and when we are angry we are usually thinking about what “should” happen or how someone “should” behave. Sadness tends to be about loss, guilt about judgments about our own behavior, and embarrassment tends to be created by assumptions about how others might judge us.
You can improve your skills of identifying your thoughts by checking-in with yourself next time you have a feeling. So next time you feel anxious ask yourself “what am I worrying about?”
The first technique is very simple, but usually can be effective for most people. This technique involves carrying a small notebook, a piece of paper, or a cue card with you (and a pen) and writing down any automatic thoughts you have when you feel anxious, depressed, angry, etc. You can also use worksheets to help with this process. Here are some hints for writing down automatic thoughts:
Although this one can seem silly, it can be one of the most effective skills for identifying thinking. Simple think of a time when you were feeling depressed, anxious, angry, etc. Then draw a stick person in that situation. Here’s an example of a stick-person getting anxious when they saw a snake when he was on a hike with his stick-girlfriend:
Then simply guess or imagine what the stick-person might have been telling himself in this situation to create his anxiety.
Usually, what we imagine the stick person might have been thinking is precisely what we were telling ourselves in this situation.
Other techniques to become more aware of our thinking include meditation and free association. These techniques encourage us to be mindful or our thoughts in the present moment.
Once we can identify our thoughts, we can then use cognitive-restructuring techniques to change the way we feel and/or behave.
Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in 2002 for the work he, and fellow psychologist Amos Tversky, began in 1974 when they and published their article “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” in the esteemed academic journal Science (Vol 185. Pp. 1124-1131). Tversky and Kahneman sought to understand how humans made decisions in uncertain situations. This work suggests people use a series of mental processes to make decisions and the underlying machinery of these mental processes tends to make predictable errors. Their findings have profound implications for our understanding of mental health.
Anxiety is the product of perceiving a threat to something we value. In the simplest terms, when we believe there is a bear (a threat) in the bush near us (something we value) our body gets ready to run/fight/or freeze (anxiety). This simple formula can take far more advanced forms because we can value other things besides our own physical health and threats can take many forms beside that of a bear. While threats and things we value can take many forms, our bodies only have a small number of responses. These responses are run, fight, or freeze and we interpret our bodies getting ready to do these things as anxiety. For example, public speaking is perceived to be a threat to our goal of being perceived as competent and confident, taking a test poses a threat to our hopes of completing a class with a particular grade, and running out of gas threatens our goal of getting where we want on time. Our bodies will get ready to deal with all of these threats in the same ways – by making us anxious.
If we accept this formula as an explanation for why we get anxious, this leads to another reasonable question: How do we decide how much of a threat something is? Tversky and Kahneman provide us with an answer but first let’s consider some other questions:
To answer these questions our minds could use a number of different strategies. Our minds could list every known English word that is 3 or more letters, then compare how many begin with K and how many have K as the third letter. Even if we used this exhaustive and thorough strategy, our answers would be imperfect because we do not know every English word so we would be guessing based on the words we do know. As for the questions about heart attacks and honesty, we would never truly know the exact values because we are not omniscient and honesty is not something you can quantifiably measure. However, most people do not find it difficult to come up with answers to all of these questions. In fact, people tend to come up with answers extremely quickly.
When we are asked questions like these, our minds take the question we have been asked then quickly replace this very difficult question with a simpler question like “How easily can I remember or imagine something like this?”
If you are like most people, when asked the question about the letter K, you tried to think of words that begin with the letter K or had K as the third letter. If you could easily recall words beginning with K, but had greater difficulty thinking of words with K as the third letter, you concluded there must be more words beginning with K. Words with K tend to be easier to recall and most people assume there are more words beginning with K, even though there are more words with K as the third letter in English. Instead of being able to provide the true likelihood of heart attacks, our mind replaces this question with something like “How easily can you remember or imagine a middle aged man having a heart attack?” Then finally, you likely replaced the question about honesty with “How easily can I remember situations in which I was honest and dishonest?” It is not about how many memories we have being honest or dishonest, we form our judgments on the availability of those memories. Memories we can easily recall are said to be more available to our conscious minds than memories that are difficult to recall.
This mental “trick” is called the “availability heuristic.” As Tversky and Kahneman explain in their 1974 article, “There are situations in which people assess the frequency of a class or the probability of an event by the ease with which instances or occurrences can be brought to mind” (p. 1127). In other words, we believe something to be more likely if memories or fantasies of similar situations are “available” to our conscious mind. Most of the time the availability heuristic serves us pretty well. If something frequently happens in our life (the sun comes up every morning), one can assume it is likely for it to happen again without many costs being associated with this prediction. This allows us to avoid living in a constant state of uncertainty, predict what is likely to happen in the future, and plan accordingly. Unfortunately, the availability heuristic can be biased and sometimes this can have serious adverse consequences.
The availability heuristic is disproportionately influenced by recent and emotionally salient situations. Following a traumatic experience, people are far more likely to overestimate the probability of a similar traumatic event happening which artificially inflates our perceptions of how threatening a situation is, which in-turn unnecessarily increases anxiety and distress. Following a car accident, you will likely overestimate the likelihood of being in another car accident, which increases anxiety while driving. Following 9/11, many of us felt a new anxiety we did not previously experience while getting on air planes, not because flying was anymore dangerous (flying had probably never been safer than after 9/11) but because memories and fantasies of planes being high jacked were far more available.
We determine which situations are threatening not by assessing the true threat level, but by assessing how easily we can remember or imagine similar situations ending-up poorly. Panic disorder can manifest in a number of ways, everyone is different, but people with panic disorder tend to worry that bodily sensations (heart arrhythmias, increased heart rates, accelerated breathing, dizziness, sweating, etc.) are evidence of a serious catastrophe (heart attack, stoke, going insane, etc.) which escalates anxiety resulting in panic attacks. Once we’ve had a single panic attack, the memory of this experience can be particularly available because panic attacks are so emotionally distressing. If we have had a panic attack in a store, we might later wonder about the possibility of having a panic attack in another store like Walmart. This question about the probability of having a panic attack in that particular Walmart at that particular time is replaced with “How easily can I imagine having a heart attack in Walmart?” If the answer is “very easily” then, we will assume the likelihood of having a panic attack in Walmart is high and we will likely avoid Walmart to avoid having another panic attack.
In obsessive-compulsive disorder (speaking of true OCD not the “OCD” people claim to have when they have strong preferences for cleanliness or organization), people can grossly overestimate the likelihood of someone breaking into their home and murdering their family because this specific fantasy can be incredibly distressing. When a fantasy is emotionally distressing, it is more available to consciousness, and this availability inflates perceptions of likelihood. Put simply, because the obsession is so upsetting, people will think it is likely, and they will act compulsively to reduce the probability of the feared event occurring.
In addition to anxiety disorders, the availability heuristic also plays a role in the development and maintenance of other mental health challenges. People with eating disorders often worry that people will judge them negatively if they were “fat.” They sometimes have vivid fantasies of being publically ridiculed or rejected for having what most people would consider to be an average or even below average weight. The maintenance of an eating disorder is riddled with availability heuristic errors. Often people will be able to easily imagine people judging them for being “fat” because they themselves frequently judge other people as fat and they take this as evidence suggesting other people have similar thoughts. The memory of their own judgments will be available because they are so frequent and this will inflate their perception about the likelihood of other people being judgmental like themselves. There are often historical traumas in childhood in which the person with the eating disorder was indeed bullied, mocked, and/or criticized, sometimes by close loved ones. While memories of this abuse are no longer recent, they may be incredibly available because of their emotional salience. They may also judge themselves as inadequate because they can easily recall examples of “beautiful” celebrities which inflates their perception of the regularity of these “beautiful” people.
When we are depressed, we will often have negative automatic thoughts about ourselves like “I’m a failure” or “I’m a loser.” Our minds will form these judgments by seeing which memories are most available, so if we can easily recall examples of “failures” or “losing”, we will be more likely to make judgments consistent with these memories. Since we tend to feel negative emotions more intensely than positive emotions, memories involving failure and loss may be easier to recall, and so these memories bias the availability heuristic and negatively distort our judgments.
The availability heuristic seems to be at the heart of many mental health challenges and this has some interesting implications for the treatment of mental illness. The availability heuristic is biased by recent and emotionally evoking memories and being aware of these biases allows us to think critically about the assumptions we make. In his 2011 book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” Daniel Kahneman explains “Resisting this large collection of potential availability biases is possible, but tiresome. You must make the effort to reconsider your impressions and intuitions by asking such questions as, ‘Is our belief that thefts by teenagers are a major problem due to a few recent instances in our neighborhood?’ or ‘could it be that I feel no need to get a flu shot because none of my acquaintances got the flu last year?’ Maintaining one’s vigilance against biases is a chore – but the change to avoid a costly mistake is sometimes worth the effort” (p. 131). This method of monitoring and thinking critically about our assumptions is identical to the cognitive restructuring interventions used in Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy.
In addition to cognitive restructuring, exposure based therapies may also be used to combat the biases of the availability heuristic. It’s no surprise that people tend to avoid anxiety provoking situations. As Dr. David Burns explains in his book When Panic Attacks:
Most people who are anxious avoid the things they fear, so they never experience enlightenment or relief. If you’re afraid of heights, you’ll avoid high places because they make you feel dizzy and anxious. If you’re shy, you’ll avoid people, because you feel so insecure and inadequate. The avoidance fuels your fears, and your anxiety mushrooms. If you want to be cured, you’ll have to face the thing you fear the most. There are no exceptions to this rule. (Pp. 252-253)
Imagine a person who has a panic attack on an elevator. Following this experience, when the person’s mind attempts to calculate how dangerous a particular elevator is, it will not be calculating the true risk of taking the elevator because this is truly unknowable for every elevator in the world at any given time. It’s not like their mind will know there is a 1.2496% chance something goes wrong if they get in that elevator right now and remain in it for 28 seconds. Instead, they will replace the question, “How dangerous is this elevator?” with “how easily can I recall having an uncomfortable emotional experience in situations similar to what I imagine it is like to be in that elevator?” The memory of their last panic attack in the elevator will be very available because it is so emotionally evoking, even if it is not recent, and so the person will conclude getting on the elevator will be very dangerous. However, if the person decides to go into the elevator, even though they feel anxious, there is very little chance anything will go wrong. They will likely feel anxious and perhaps even have another panic attack, but after a few minutes this anxiety will dissipate. If they stay until their anxiety is gone, they may even feel pride and excitement about their achievement. Let’s say they repeat this exposure exercise 5 or even 10 times. The next time they wonder about how dangerous it is to get on an elevator, the memories of taking the elevator with nothing bad happening will be far more available and they will conclude the elevator is likely safe.
I recommend combining both of these cognitive and behavioral (exposure) approaches. Be mindful of how and why your mind is making the predictions and judgments it is making, but also go and have positive experiences to replace the negative memories creating these predictions and judgments. As you change your assumptions, predictions, and judgments through cognitive restructuring and exposure, you’ll experience serious emotional changes.
To be thorough, lets consider an example in which a person is depressed. As mentioned above, people who are depressed frequently experience negative judgments and predictions. We can fight depression by identifying and thinking critically about these judgments and predictions. So when we tell ourselves things like “I really can’t do anything right” we notice these thoughts and write them down, or record them in some way. Writing down our thoughts is a great way of distancing ourselves from what we are thinking. Then we think critically about these thoughts by simply asking some questions like “What memories is my mind accessing when I think I can’t do anything right? Are there other examples of me doing things reasonably well that my availability heuristic is ignoring? I put my pants on today correctly, is that not an example of doing “anything” right? So if I have done somethings right, like putting on pants, what do I really mean when I think I can’t do anything right? Do I mean that I have some regrets and if so, how do I know I have more regrets than other people? Even I have done more regretful things, what can I do about it? What is the value to ruminating on these regrets?” So this is one example of a cognitive restructuring technique called Socratic Questioning.
To combine our cognitive restructuring with a behavioral technique to combat the biases of the availability heuristic, we might create a list of things we could do to have the experience of doing something right. To make this list we might ask, what are some things you would be proud to do? Things like hike a mountain, read a book, volunteer, get a job, take a class, or clean up a local park. Then the depressed person would go and do these things, even if they don’t feel motivated to do so (action comes first, motivation comes later). The person would take photos of how they did and this would serve as evidence to dispute future thoughts about not doing anything right. Combining both these cognitive and behavioral approaches will help the person to become less depressed over time by combating the availability heuristic’s biases for emotionally evoking and recent memories.
To summarize, the availability heuristic is a mental process we use to make predictions and judgments. While it frequently helps us make complex decisions effectively, it is also biased to overemphasize recent and emotionally salient memories and fantasies. Unfortunately, these biases can create and maintain challenges like anxiety and depression. Cognitive restructuring and exposure techniques can help us challenge the underlying thinking which contributes to these problems.
Postscript
I’ve been studying the work of Tversky and Kahneman for several months now, beginning with the Michael Lewis book “The Undoing Project” which tells the amazing story of how they changed the world of psychology, economics, health care, finance, marketing, and so many more fields. Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases is a brilliant 7-page article that can be found for free – click here. Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow is a fantastic insight into our minds and how they work.
There are many reasons people resist making positive changes in their lives. As a therapist, the number of reasons I’ve heard for not making a change is truly astounding. When I talk about this with people, they explain it’s obvious – people don’t make changes because they “fear change.” I’ve always found this explanation to be unsatisfying. It sounds like another example of people wanting a simple explanation for something complicated. Why do people fear change? What specifically about change do people fear? I tried to answer these questions by reading Robert Leahy’s “Overcoming Resistance in Cognitive Therapy.” From this book, others like it, and my own experiences, I have learned resistance does not interfere with therapy, overcoming resistance is the therapy. Most people have an idea of how they could make a positive change in their lives, but they typically resist making these changes. One of the most interesting chapters in Leahy’s book describes the “Investment Model of Resistance” and how it applies to people with depression.
When people are depressed they are less likely to engage with activities which would likely reduce their depression. Instead of problem solving, exercising, socializing, working, sleeping 8 hours, and eating a healthy diet, people with depression are more likely to isolate, withdraw, conserve energy, and avoid. This is referred to as the “depressive paradox.” When people are depressed, one would expect them to be more motivated to pursue pleasure and meaningful engagement. Like how a starving person becomes intensely motivated to acquire food. From this perspective, avoiding potentially rewarding and enjoyable experiences seems to make no logical sense. As opposed to accepting a person with depression is simply illogical and self-destructive, Leahy’s Investment Model of Resistance suggests people with depression are primarily motivated to avoid losses, failures, and rejections, as opposed to being motivated by the possibility of acquiring the potential benefits of making a change. Like how a person who is intensely afraid of losing money will turn down a great investment opportunity because they cannot tolerate even a minimal amount of risk. Leahy suggests there is an underlying logic to the decision making of a depressed person, but this logic is based on distorted assumptions and beliefs.
Aaron Beck is one of the founding fathers of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Beck’s Cognitive Model of Depression is an immensely valuable contribution to our understanding of depression. Beck suggests negative life experiences result in the formulation of dysfunctional assumptions about the self, the world, and the future. For example, people with abusive or neglectful parents may develop 
the assumptions that they are truly inadequate losers, others are a source of rejection and criticism, and they will inevitably fail and end up in unsatisfying relationships or be abandoned. Our dysfunctional assumptions become triggered by critical incidents (losses, failures, criticism, rejection, etc.) and this results in negative automatic thoughts (“I’m a loser”, “why can’t I do anything right”, “I’m going to end up alone”, “I have no real friends”, etc.). These negative automatic thoughts lead to extreme emotional responses (sadness, hurt, guilt, anxiety, etc.) which then leads to exaggerated behavioral responses (withdrawing, isolating, defensiveness, people-pleasing, conserving energy, etc.). We describe this combination of unhelpful and distressing thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as depression.
I combined Leahy’s Investment Model of Resistance with Beck’s Cognitive Model of Depression in an attempt to better understand how depression can originate and be maintained. Once we formulate dysfunctional assumptions from negative life experiences we may try to avoid critical incidents which may confirm their dysfunctional assumptions. For example, if we believe that we are unattractive we avoid asking potential mates out on dates, because the rejection could trigger too much pain and hurt. Sometimes we can be moderately successful at avoiding critical incidents and we can be “fine” for a long time. Unfortunately, loss, failure, criticism, and rejection are unavoidable parts of the human experience regardless of how much we attempt to avoid or overcompensate. When we inevitably have one of these experiences, this activates our dysfunctional assumptions. We assume our skills are inadequate, we cannot cope with further losses/failures, and our resources are minimal (viewing energy and effort as finite and minimal). We fail to recall previous successes and assume/believe our lives have been an unending and unwavering pattern of misery which influences our predictions about the effectiveness of making positive changes. We also view the costs of even minor failures/losses as catastrophic and assume we will continue to fail into the future. As Leahy explains “To the depressive, losses are not simple inconveniences. Rather, they are interpreted as salient, personally relevant, morally significant, and predictive of further losses in other domains. Ironically, because losses are so overvalued, the depressive will avoid loss at all costs.”
The Investment Model of Resistance suggests when our dysfunctional assumptions are activated, we fear further failure and loss. This fear motivates us to avoid situations that could potentially give us some benefit (go for a run, call a friend, find a new job, enhance our education, prepare healthy meals, problem solve, etc.) because each of these situations also pose the possibility of failure, loss, and rejection. In some cases the costs of making a particular change are obvious (like financial costs), in other situations the costs are more discrete. An example of a discrete cost might be the loss of energy associated with making a particular change. Some ways we may avoid making changes include requiring more “motivation” prior to making a change, trying to not think about our problems (excessive distraction and sleeping for example), demanding a 100% guarantee we will succeed before trying, and insisting someone else solve our problems for us.
If we do muster the energy and motivation to try something, we often quit at the first sign of failure or loss. Many people that are depressed try problem solving, exercising, socializing, practicing gratitude, etc. Perhaps we tried once, for a week, a month, or maybe even 6 months but our depression undermines our attempts to make progress in a number of ways.
When we are depressed we have a high threshold for perceiving gains and a low threshold for perceiving costs. When we try something and don’t get a full remission of depressive symptoms, we conclude it didn’t work at all and if something even remotely undesirable happens, we believe it to be a catastrophe. Even minor losses/failures are turned into catastrophes by the person’s own excessive and unrealistic self-blame. This is sometimes “all or nothing thinking” or “catastrophizing” and is an example of cognitively distorted thinking. Take for example, the person who musters their courage to disagree with their partner for the first time in their relationship. Naturally, when we are setting boundaries we may be changing established relationship dynamics that may be working for the other people in our relationships. So when we are assertive and our partner responds with anger and frustration because we are trying to change the relationship dynamics that may be working just fine for them, we may have the negative automatic thought “I tried and it was a disaster.” In this example, we are failing to identify our gains – practicing our assertiveness skills and communicating our boundaries. It’s similar to the person who has never played basketball concluding they will never be able to play because they missed their first three point shot. Our high threshold for perceiving gains is also influenced by our causal explanations for our successes and failures. If we do something well, we blame transient and external factors like luck or the task being so easy anyone could do it. On the other hand, when we do something poorly we blame stable and internal factors like our own inadequacy. This reaffirms our distorted beliefs that we are inadequate, all we have done is fail, and all we will ever do will fail.
When we are trying to make positive changes in our lives costs often precede benefits. So if we quit after paying the cost of making a change but before attaining the benefits, we can conclude further effort would be futile. Furthermore, the benefits may be subtle and go undetected. For example, suppose you added daily exercise to your routine. Exercising costs us time, energy, and comfort before we get the eventual, but often subtle, benefits of exercise. In this situation, it may be easy to have the negative automatic thought “exercise doesn’t help at all, I exercise daily and still feel depressed.” However, our daily exercising may be providing us with the undetected benefits of protecting us from further depression, diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, chronic pain, etc. While it may be true that we are still depressed despite exercising, we cannot know how much worse we would be without exercising. Also, if exercising does not work (provide a complete remission of depressive symptoms) we also lose it as a possible solution to our problems. As the list of possible things we can do to get out of our depression gets shorter there is additional evidence for our dysfunctional assumptions that we are inadequate and will never get better.
Our outright avoidance of making potentially beneficial changes and our trying a solution but quitting before attaining benefits, not only undermines our problem solving but it actually creates new problems. For example, if we avoid exercising, we not only have to deal with our depression persisting but we may also develop serious health complications in the future. If we try to set boundaries with a behaviorally challenging teenaged child but we quit because it didn’t get the results we wanted quick enough, the child’s behavioral problems could continue to escalate and create new problems. Similar to the patterns above, the development of new problems then reinforces the assumptions about our inadequacy and our inevitable failure.
Leahy also identifies another aspect depression which may contribute to resistance of making positive changes. Leahy suggests people struggling with depression develop assumptions about being “sadder but wiser” which may reinforce their dysfunctional assumptions. From their experiences of perceiving constant failures and losses, they come to believe they have an accurate view of the world as negative, hostile, and filled with suffering. They may even derive some satisfaction and a sense of superiority from arguing with others about how their view of the world is accurate, which will reinforce these assumptions. Those struggling with depression may even use their own self-sabotaged attempts to make progress as evidence in support of their arguments. This is the “I’m going to fail, I’ll try but quit when I don’t get the results I want, oh look I failed, I was right all along” rationale. As explained by Leahy “By proving that he is correct about his negativity and that the therapist is Pollyannaish in his optimism, the depressive believes that he has achieved some “victory” – he has proven the therapist wrong. Even though this may add to his sense of hopelessness, he at least feels some momentary superiority to the ‘naïve therapist.’” Granted there is no shortage of horror, despair, and suffering in the world but to focus exclusively upon these aspects of the human experience provides a biased and cognitively distorted perspective. Although you may briefly feel satisfied and superior by arguing you are “sadder but wiser”, in my opinion the costs of remaining stuck greatly outweigh these potential benefits. I was unsure about how to add the development and maintenance of this “sadder but wiser” philosophy to my model but I thought it was an interesting idea and worth mentioning in this article.
My combining The Cognitive Model of Depression and The Investment Model of Resistance is my attempt to explain how depression is developed and maintained. As opposed to being “afraid of change” or “irrational”, my model suggests people with depression are primarily motivated to resist making positive changes in their lives because of fears of further failure and loss associated with dysfunctional assumptions. I’ve kept Beck’s emphasis on the development of dysfunctional assumptions by negative life events and the activation of these assumptions by critical incidents. I’ve attempted to expand upon the “negative automatic thoughts” portion of Beck’s model by including cognitive processes from Leahy’s Investment Model of Resistance. In my combined model, negative automatic thoughts are expanded to include fears of further failure and loss, underestimating skills and coping abilities, viewing energy as limited and easily exhausted, distorted causal explanations for successes and failures, and all or nothing thinking about progress and failure. The model I created is cyclical, explaining why the depressed individual may become “stuck” indefinitely.
An astute critic of my model may notice I did not include a path out of this cycle. While I’ll likely expand my model in the future, my goal at this time was to better understand the resistance of someone struggling with depression. However, my research suggests there are likely benefits to helping the client identify and challenge assumptions of their own inadequacy and the cost/inevitability of failure through the use of a variety of cognitive and behavioral interventions. These interventions may include cognitive restructuring techniques, activity scheduling, behavioral experiments, exposure therapy, goal setting, and problem solving training (see previous articles for more information).
Leahy’s Investment Model of Resistance is significantly more complex than the model I have created. I should also note that Leahy does not provide a visual representation of his model in Overcoming Resistance in Cognitive Therapy and I have attempted to simplify and approximate how the various factors described by his model may interact. For more information on Leahy’s model, I recommend purchasing his book. The version of Beck’s Cognitive Model of Depression was from Cognitive Behaviour Therapy Case Studies by Thomas and Drake. While I have not conducted any studies to assess the validity of my model, it is consistent with the anecdotal accounts of many people I have met who have struggled with depression, some of which provided direct, but informal feedback, about this model.
I would also like to note that by attempting to identify how the decision making of a person struggling with depression may contribute to maintaining that depression, I am not attempting to blame anyone and make them feel worse. In fact my intentions are to help expand our understanding of depression, so we can better understand and help those struggling with depression. By focusing on what we can control, and the consequences of the decisions we make, we are empowered to make positive changes in our lives.
All counselling theories (narrative therapy, psychoanalysis, DBT, 
mindfulness based theories, CBT, etc.) all have underlying philosophies about how human beings “work”, what is “healthy”, and how people can remove barriers to become more “healthy.” People might be surprised to know there are a number of different variations of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). One type of CBT is called Rational-Emotive Therapy (RET) and it was created by Albert Ellis. This article describes the underlying philosophies of RET and has been adapted from Bill Borcherdt’s book “Think Straight! Feel Great! 21 guides to Emotional Self-Control.”
RET is designed to teach people:
I suspect people will see some common themes in these recommendations. Generally, RET emphasizes personal responsibility and choice, it suggests that we are responsible for our emotional reactions and we can change our emotions, by changing what and how we think. RET also recommends we unconditionally accept our “self” while judging our emotional reactions as “appropriate” or “inappropriate”, which I think is an interesting idea. While I do not choose to use this terminology with my clients, I agree that intense emotions can interfere with our attempts to achieve our goals.
Most clients are resistant to making changes in their lives, usually for a variety of different 
reasons. People tend to want to minimize their choices and responsibility by suggesting they have no control over what they think or feel. There are several old videos of Albert Ellis working with clients on YouTube, and he has a very direct and almost confrontational style that I believe is reflected in the uncompromising philosophy of RET (click here for a classical example of RET at work). I’m not saying the advice listed above is bad advice, just that I suspect giving this advice in a way that clients could receive it non-defensively could take some tact.
There are two workbooks you can now access in our “self-help” section for free.
The Making Changes workbook can help you learn about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy principles and how to apply them to your life. It can help you improve your living habits, set goals, and change your thinking.
The new Anxiety workbook can teach you about anxiety, skills to manage anxiety, and steps you can take to reduce your anxiety over time. Here is an portion from that workbook:
SUMMARY
· Anxiety is a normal human response to perceived danger.
· The more we worry, the more we are thinking about potential dangers, this then triggers the anxiety response.
· We can practice skills like box breathing, 5-4-3-2-1 sensory grounding, and progress muscle relaxation to cope with extreme anxiety.
· Cognitive behavioral therapy can help use reduce our anxiety.
· Our thoughts cause our emotions and behaviors, not situations. Therefore, our anxiety is being created by the story in our head, not the situation we are in.
· When we experience excessive anxiety we are usually engaging in unhelpful thinking styles.
· CBT teaches us to recognize our unhelpful thinking and then dispute irrational thoughts, replacing them with more helpful thoughts.
· Excessive worry fuels excessive anxiety. Sometimes we believe excessive worry can be a good thing, but these beliefs maintain worry.
· When we believe (1) “problems are threatening”, (2) “I can’t handle problems effectively”, and (3) “problems will turn out badly regardless of what I do” we are preventing effective problem solving. We can solve this by recognizing problems as a normal part of life and seeing the opportunities presented by our problems.
· A problem solving model can be used to help us effectively cope with challenges we can reasonably do something about.
· Graded exposure can be used to decrease the amount of anxiety we experience in situations. Graded exposure is a process by which we practice exposing ourselves to anxiety provoking situations, practicing and developing our skills, and gradually learning situations are not as threatening as our minds make them.
· We can improve our abilities to cope with stressors by maintaining a healthy self-care plan which includes diet, exercise, sleep, relaxation, work , socializing, thinking helpful thoughts, and goal setting.
We recently posted a free workbook in our “self-help” section. This workbook teaches some of the fundamental principles of cognitive behavioural therapy.
You should do breathing exercises. Maybe do yoga a few times a week and you’ll feel better. Go for a walk daily. Start your day off with a 10 minute meditation.
I cannot count the number of times people have given me advice like this to me. These are probably good suggestions and they do indeed have a reasonable amount of research supporting them, but I believe they are insufficient for promoting lasting composure. I do see a lot of value in maintaining a relaxed, composed state of mind while going through my day. When we are calm our brains function differently, we have superior reasoning and problem solving abilities. I think many people can relate to the experience of reacting inappropriately when distressed. How can 10 minutes of meditation in the morning, a walk, or yoga a couple of times a week maintain my composure throughout the day? I do not believe it can. Instead, perhaps I need a tool I can easily use throughout the day to maintain my composure. For me, this tool is practicing mindfulness.
Mindfulness refers to paying attention to the present moment, without judgement. Practicing mindfulness is simple and incredibly effective for regulating my emot
ions throughout my day. What does practicing mindfulness look like? Take a breath, notice the air filling your lungs, notice your rib cage expanding, notice your heart beat, just notice how it feels. Focus on those things, and without judgment (“It should be deeper”, “it should be slower”, “it should be…”), just notice the way it is. Congratulations, you have just practiced mindfulness. It’s that simple.
Paying attention to your breath can be convenient because we always have our breath, even in a completely dark room, late at night but we do not have to pay attention to our breathing to practice mindfulness. We can be focused on anything in the present moment without judgement to practice mindfulness. By “judgment” I mean assigning interpretations like “good”, “bad”, “better”, “worse”, etc. For instance I often look at a tree outside my office window. I watch how the sun hits each leaf, I look at the shades of green and grey, I watch it move in the wind. Instead of thinking “that is a beautiful tree” or “that tree should be bigger” I just notice and accept how it is in the present moment.
I direct my attention to the present moment hundreds of times a day. As the people in my life can attest (with some frustration occasionally) I do very little worrying about the future. I also try and rarely think about the past, besides considering what I can learn from it and moving on. My paying attention to the present allows me to avoid much of the anxiety and depression that is associated with worrying about the future and regretting the past.
But I need to problem-solve and plan! I can’t just be sitting around looking at trees all day! I agree, that is impractical. However, I would argue that many people do far more worrying and regretting than are truly necessary. How many times have you lay in bed and lost sleep because you were trying to worry your way out of a problem? So we problem solve and plan when we must, and we stay in the present as often as we can. This way when we do have to problem we are composed, and our thinking is productive.
Okay, so what happens when I’m paying attention to the present moment and my mind just naturally thinks about the future or the past? It takes practice to stay in the present moment for any extended amount of time but while we are training our minds we want to be compassionate with ourselves. Like training a puppy, we want to be consistent, reliable, and gentle. So when our minds wander to a place they don’t need to be, we gently guide it back to the present.
I find practicing mindfulness to be most helpful in distressing situations. For example, when talking in-front of people I find it very helpful to just take a deep breath and just for a moment notice the air filling my lungs and my ribs expanding. This relaxes me immediately. Or after a stressful experience I will take a breath and just ask myself “what is going on in my mind right now?”, “what am I feeling?”, and “where are these emotions coming from?” I find this to be much more helpful for regulating my emotions than thinking “stop getting angry”, “I shouldn’t (judgement) worry about this”, or “I’m being too dramatic (judgment).”
The Jewish psychiatrist Viktor Frankl remembers the day he entered the camps:
His book Man’s Search for Meaning tells a harrowing tale of some of the worst conditions humans have been exposed to in modern history. As I read this book for the first time, several years ago, I was mesmerized by Dr. Frankl’s seemingly endless ability to recognize the opportunities within his experiences. His beliefs about problems and suffering were infectious.
Negative Problem Orientation
Put simply, a person’s problem orientation refers to their beliefs about problems and their ability to solve problems. People with a negative problem orientation are more likely to view problems as excessively threatening, they typically doubt their ability to solve problems, and they believe negative outcomes will occur regardless of how much effort they put in to solve them. As a result of these beliefs, researchers Dugas and Robichaud suggest people with a particularly negative problem orientation are more likely to be frustrated, irritated, anxious, or depressed when they face a problem. Behaviorally, people with a negative problem orientation are more likely to procrastinate and/or avoid problem solving. As a result, they can make new problems for themselves and increase worries.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, negative problem orientation has been connected with a wide variety of mental health difficulties including generalized anxiety disorder, depression, pathological gambling, and post-traumatic stress disorder (Robichaud & Dugas, 2005).
Locus of Control
In my opinion, a person’s problem orientation plays a massive role in how they approach the world. There seems to be a large overlap between problem orientation and something, in psychology, we call “locus of control.” Our locus of control can be described as our beliefs about how much we influence what happens in our lives. People with an “internal locus of control” typically believe they greatly influence their destiny. While people with an “external locus of control” typically believe that what happens in their lives is largely controlled by forces outside of them. Research over the last 65 years has suggested that people with an internal locus of control have greater academic success, are more motivated, are more socially mature, have less stress and depression, and live longer. They “earn more money, have more friends, stay married longer, and report greater professional success and satisfaction” (Duhigg, 2016, p. 24). So to summarize, people with an internal locus of control will usually be less threatened by problems, work harder to solve problems, and believe they can mitigate negative outcomes through effective problem solving. In other words, they have a more positive problem orientation.
So if a negative problem orientation and an external locus of control are typically unhelpful for promoting health and wellbeing, what can we do to change?
Luckily, research suggests there are a few things we can do to improve our problem orientation and our beliefs about locus of control. Dugas and Robichaud suggest we first have to learn how to identify problems. Many clients enter therapy and believe that their emotions are the problem, they just want to be happy. However, emotions are not the problem. Emotions are data, they are just information giving you clues something is or is not working for you in life. The problem is not that you are depressed, the problem may be you are stuck in a relationship that is not good for you, it could be that your habits are not particularly healthy, it might be that you are stuck in depressive thinking habits, perhaps the problem is that you are in a concentration camp, etc. Once we can see our emotions as information, this can help you identify appropriate solutions to the real problems.
The belief that we are exceptional because we experience problems can keep us stuck. Why does this keep happening to me? Why was I the one who was dealt a bad hand in life? We can improve our problem orientations by challenging these kinds of beliefs and recognizing that experiencing problems in life is normal. Suffering is an important part of life, it is times when we suffer the most that we are motivated to adapt and grow the most.
Challenge filtering and overgeneralizing (see our cognitive distortions list). An internal locus of control and/or a negative problem orientation occurs because we are not paying enough attention to all the times your effort and practice have influenced outcomes. We conclude because we could not have possibly prevented ____________ from happening in the past, why bother trying in the future? While there is a lot in life that you cannot control, there is a massive amount that you can. By just focusing on the things we cannot control, we are underestimating the number of choices we have. When we underestimate the choices we have, we are reinforcing the belief that we are not responsible for what happens to us and this can be a very comfortable delusion to live in. However, this short term comfort comes with a price, it disempowers us and maintains a victim mentality.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we can improve our problem orientation by recognizing the opportunities that are within all of the problems we experience. Every problem has opportunities associated with it. Few people illustrate this better than Viktor Frankl. While in the camps, he became very sick, and with the sickness came a far greater likelihood of being “selected” to go to the gas chambers. Despite his sickness he remembers:
This sickness gave him the opportunity to rest. More generally, by being a prisoner within the camp, Frankl recognized he was given the opportunity to study what happens to a human under such circumstances. He was given the opportunity to understand how people find meaning and purpose even in the worst of conditions. Gordon Allport describes Frankl’s conclusions beautifully in his preface:
Being in the camp presented many, very real and horrifying, problems. However, Frankl was also given the opportunity to choose how he was going to cope with these problems. He was given the opportunity to search for answers to some very fundamental human questions – what prevents some men from committing suicide in such horrible conditions? Why choose to live when one can simple run to the electric fences at any time? What motivates a man to treat prisoners a particular way? Etc.
When your partner says something you don’t agree with, you are being given the opportunity to practice your non-defensive communication skills. When you lose a relationship you have the opportunity to be a kind, loving, and respectful person even when things do not go your way. When you get lost, you have the opportunity to become familiar with somewhere new. When you are in a concentration camp, you have the opportunity to study how humans adapt to such horrible conditions and find meaning and purpose despite great suffering.
If you have children, it is likely they will experience their own challenges in life (divorce, trauma, accidents, health problems, etc.) and every time you experience these things, you are being given the opportunity to teach your kids how to effectively face these problems in their own lives. By recognizing the opportunities within the problems we face, we are going to be more likely to accept when problems occur and we will be more motivated to engage with our problems in a helpful way.
Duhigg, C. (2016). Smarter, faster, better: The secrets of being productive in life and business. Doubleday Canada.
Frankl, V. E. (1959). Man’s search for meaning: An introduction to logotherapy. Washington Square Press, New York.
Robichaud, M., Dugas, M. (2005). Negative problem orientation (part I): Psychometric properties of a new measure. Behavior Research and Therapy (43)3, 391-401.
I’ll never find anyone as good. I’ll never meet someone else, never have my own family. I can’t handle this. This isn’t fair. I’m unlovable. Everything is awful.
Most people are familiar with thoughts like these. When under intense stress, like the loss of a significant relationship, our minds often go to those dark places. Sometimes our thoughts are irrational and since these thoughts are extreme, the emotions they evoke are also irrational. I tell clients all the time that I do not want them to be an unfeeling robot. If we suffer a significant loss we should feel some grief, if we are treated unfairly it is normal to feel angry, and it is okay to be sad sometimes. However, sometimes we have emotional reactions which are disproportionate to the situation. It is these intense emotional reactions which usually lead to behavior that is inconsistent with our values and goals. Since we know emotions are caused by thinking, we can reduce the intensity of irrational emotional responses by changing the irrational thinking evoking them.
“There are no facts, only interpretations.”
Dr. Aaron Beck is widely considered the father of Cognitive Therapy. He was trained in the classical forms of therapy pioneered by Sigmund Freud (Psychodynamic Therapy). Psychodynamic Theory suggests that our thoughts are the product of unconscious or subconscious forces within our psyche. In other words, this theory suggests that our thoughts mean something about us. While at a dinner party, Dr. Beck met a woman and this interaction would change psychotherapy forever. The story is that this woman explained she was depressed and she believed that no one loved her/she was unlovable. Instead of going down the usual therapeutic road, Dr. Beck decided to try something different. He asked her to evaluate the evidence for her beliefs. To her surprise, the woman was able to recognize that there were several people in her life that loved her and when she focused on this, her sadness dissipated (listen to this great podcast for more information). While working with severely depressed patients in his clinic, he noticed several common thinking errors within the thoughts of his patients. Today these thinking errors are called “cognitive distortions.” By identifying and challenging cognitive distortions, our thinking can become more rational and as a result our emotions will also become more rational.
In the following table I demonstrate how the “three column technique” can be used to challenge cognitively distorted thoughts. In this exercise you identify your distressing thoughts, identify cognitive distortions taking place, and try and come up with more rational thoughts.
While a full description of all of the common cognitive distortions is beyond the scope of a single blog post, I will post a worksheet I use with clients on the self-help resources page that goes over them in greater detail.
When I work with clients, I typically go over a list of some common cognitive distortions. The vast majority of clients are able to recognize that they have many thoughts consistent with these unhelpful thinking styles. Clients struggling with depression usually filter out all of the good things in life, those struggling with anxiety are often plagued with catastrophizing, and people overwhelmed with anger desperately want the world to work the way they want (should/musts and the fallacy of fairness). We all think cognitively distorted thoughts sometimes, it is normal. The refreshing thing about thinking habits is that they can be changed. The first step to changing our thinking is building our awareness of our thoughts. Simply reading this post and the list of common cognitive distortions on the self-help page can help you with becoming more aware of your unhelpful thinking patterns.
Personally, learning about cognitive distortions has changed my life. Challenging my unhelpful thoughts insulates me from distress that comes with being a human being. When I am irrationally frustrated about something (like a hockey game) I pull out my journal and practice these skills. When I go through a more significant challenge (bereavement, financial concerns, trauma, etc.) I use the same skills. Before learning these theories and techniques, I would stay up for hours on end, just laying in bed ruminating about things. Now I am able to process what is going on for me and let it go. Hopefully with some practice, you will be able to do the same.
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