What Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy For Fear and Anxiety?
CBT (Comprehensive Behavior Therapy) is an evidence-based form of psychotherapy that has proven highly successful at alleviating fear and anxiety. It involves recognizing negative patterns of thought and behavior that stand in the way of living a more fulfilling life.
One of the most widely used approaches to CBT for anxiety is exposure therapy. This involves exposing someone to their feared object or situation until they no longer experience feelings of fear. The purpose is to teach individuals how to confront these anxieties without running away or doing anything else to make them less distressing.
Cognitive behavioral therapy also includes behavioural experiments. These involve someone making predictions about how they will feel or perform in a given situation and then observing if those predictions prove accurate.
Behavioural experiments are particularly helpful for patients suffering from anxiety-based mental health disorders, as they allow them to empirically test their catastrophic beliefs by anticipating experiences and assessing the repercussions of those expectations.
During these experiments, individuals are monitored by a professional and encouraged to record their experiences such as how they felt or how their body responded. These recordings help the patient gain insight into their feelings and thoughts, which could ultimately provide insight into the cause of their anxiety disorder.
This treatment’s primary objectives are to:* Break the negative thought cycle* (i.e. ‘If I do this thing, then something bad will happen and it will be extremely painful for me’);* Reframe irrational beliefs and develop more realistic and adaptive coping strategies.
Once the therapist has identified and acknowledged incorrect thinking, they can assist their client in challenging these beliefs by reframing them–that is, reinterpreting them in a more beneficial light.
It can help alleviate anxiety and give them a sense of control over their lives, improving relationships and work performance as well as raising self-esteem levels.
People can develop irrational or unhealthy beliefs through many means, such as overgeneralizing*–which equates an insignificant event with a large negative outcome.
* Personalisation*, which refers to an individual projecting their own negative emotions onto others in an overly exaggerated manner.
Irrational beliefs can be difficult to alter, but with the right guidance they can be overcome. Cognitive behavioral therapy offers people a way of doing this by identifying and challenging their most irrational thoughts about themselves and the world around them.
The therapist may employ a variety of techniques to assist their client challenge their irrational beliefs, such as cognitive restructuring, which teaches them how to reinterpret events in an advantageous light by creating alternative interpretations.
Behavioural experiments can be a highly successful tool for diminishing or eliminating an irrational belief, as they offer the individual an enjoyable way of confronting this misguided notion.
Therapists and their clients typically record client experiences to assess progress during therapy. This could be done using a range of methods, from basic questionnaires to sophisticated tracking software.