CBT At Work For Dummies

By Gill Garratt

Nip workplace stress in the bud with CBT

Packed with useful tips that make it easy to incorporate CBT—Cognitive Behavioral Therapy— into your working day, CBT at Work For Dummies helps you reap the benefits of a more focused working life. You'll discover how integrating CBT at work promotes improved productivity and concentration, lower staff turnover, enhanced employer/employee and client relationships, reduced cost of staff absenteeism caused by illness, injury, stress, and more.

An alarming number of individuals in the UK and across the globe suffer from work-related stress, some to the point of experiencing illness. The good news is, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy—often associated with treating acute mental health conditions—is finding its way into the workplace, where it's being used as a way to combat one of the most common occupational health issues: stress. In this friendly and accessible guide, you'll find everything you need to put CBT into practice today, whether you're in charge of managing employee wellness or just want to find a positive and productive way to get through the workday yourself.

• Answers the call of business leaders seeking creative solutions to enhance productivity and minimize the effects of stress in the workplace
• Offers employees trusted ways to be more effective in the workplace while reducing personal stress levels
• Arms learning and development professionals with the know-how to apply mindfulness meditation in the workplace
• Details the benefits of making CBT a part of your business plan

If you're an employer looking to get the best out of your staff or an employee interested in reducing stress and anxiety whilst achieving an enhanced performance at work, CBT at Work For Dummies can help.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Sep 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781119067375

Book preview

Part I

Getting Started with CBT at Work

webextra Visit www.dummies.com/extras/cbtatwork for great Dummies content online.

In this part …

Learn to minimize stress and take control of your emotions at work.

Discover the components of CBT and see how you can connect your feelings to your thinking.

Change the way you think with the help of a CTB toolkit that you can make.

Identify with the struggles you encounter at work to help you make your workplace a healthier environment for you.

Chapter 1

Reducing Your Anxieties at Work with CBT

In This Chapter

arrow Understanding the pressures of the modern workplace

arrow Diagnosing your work-based emotional difficulties

arrow Tooling up with CBT to survive at work

The modern workplace is often a diverse, fast-paced environment fraught with challenges and potential problems. Your role is to get through each day as best you can and achieve your targets and goals. Considering how much time you spend at work during your lifetime, you’d be unusual if sometimes you didn’t wrestle with anxieties, self-doubt, anger, guilt, confusion and a general feeling of unhappiness.

Fortunately, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) was developed to help you reduce these sorts of tensions and insecurities. In a sense, CBT guides you to become your own therapist, as you use its techniques to reflect on and tackle your troubling feelings. With CBT, you train yourself to recognise when things are getting tough and affecting your emotional wellbeing. You can then apply the CBT formula to work actively to reduce the intensity of the troubling emotions.

Think of CBT as helping you to be the world’s foremost expert on you! Your new internal voice disputes your irrational thinking, allowing you to decide whether you want to make changes in the way you view your job, other people and your employer in order to reduce your worries.

Here I introduce you to the basics of CBT and how it can help you at work. Throughout this chapter, I also provide an overview of the book as a whole, providing cross references to other chapters as appropriate.

Coping with Changing Roles at Work

The workspace is a constantly changing arena. People have always been concerned about finding ways to survive and coping with the diversification of jobs, whether they’re working on the land, in communities and villages or in specialised purpose-built offices.

You may yourself have held many different jobs, needing to adapt and retrain as necessary in order to make yourself eligible for different work roles. In fact, being flexible and having wide-ranging experiences and skills is often seen as an asset these days and not an indication that you can’t stick at a job.

The inspiration to write this book comes from my practical experience in working in many different jobs in various settings and recognising the common nature of the problems that people encounter at work.

For example, I’ve done manual work in a textile factory, taught young children in nurseries and primary schools and worked with emotionally challenged teenagers in the inner city. I’ve also studied to be a psychotherapist; worked in a ski-chalet in France, cooking and cleaning; managed lectures on a cruise ship; and written courses on change management for international financial organisations and national government.

remember The great thing about CBT strategies and skills is that you can apply them in all employment situations that people work in today, whether within local communities, in rural locations, towns or cities or in an international setting.

Stressing out at work

Workplace stress is a pretty familiar phrase in today’s marketplace and its negative effects on mental and physical health are well-documented. As a result, developing the skills and attitudes of mind to help you cope is a priority.

remember External forces, such as changing market economies affecting companies and resulting in redundancies, layoffs and closures, aren’t a reflection of your individual performance in a job but of factors outside your control.

Taking charge of your emotions

You can’t control many of the situations you encounter at work, including the bosses and managers you find yourself working under or the people in your team. But you can take control over how you’re affected by these factors. Chapter 11 talks more about CBT and work relationships.

Feeling helpless and lapsing into depression can be a response to feeling that you’re stuck in a difficult situation. You may start by experiencing feelings of anxiety, butterflies in the stomach and a dread of going into work, and fear progressing to panic. Such anxiety can result in you being more likely to make mistakes and may compound your worries. You can feel like you’re on a downward spiral of incompetence, and your self-esteem may plummet too.

The good news is that CBT can help you to train yourself to take charge of your negative emotions and do something about them before you fall into the pit of doom (your GPS won’t find it, but it’s there, just below the pothole of ruin and nestling behind the shaft of lost hope!). When you implement CBT, you become fully aware of your emotions. You’re encouraged to allow yourself to look at what’s happening and to use the CBT toolkit from Chapter 3 to work actively on dealing with your negative automatic thoughts (or NATs; see Chapter 8 for details), thus reducing the ‘disturbing’ emotions to less disruptive and manageable ones.

Thinking Rationally to Troubleshoot Your Emotions

Of all the counselling methods and therapies I trained in, CBT resonated most strongly with me. I was always a hurry hurry, rush rush type of personality, often working myself up into a state of anxiety and demonstrating low levels of tolerance for frustration. I usually achieved what I set out to do, but the road was fraught with anxiety, self-doubt and, at times, guilt.

Although I agreed with the ideas behind other forms of counselling, I felt that I didn’t have the time for weekly sessions and months of therapy. Fortunately, CBT is intended to be short-term therapy that you can apply to your whole life (see Chapters 16 and 19).

Here I lay out the basics of CBT, its practical nature and how the responsibility is on you to tackle your emotional problems and nobody else’s.

Meeting the CBT basics

CBT helps you to discover and prioritise your emotional problems, encouraging you to take responsibility for your emotional development (flip to Chapter 7 for more on these aspects). It uses examples of real-life problems to help you reinforce your learning and become accountable to yourself to work on the issues you identify as needing attention.

remember You can see CBT as comprising six areas:

Explaining the problems: Here are just a few examples of the long list of emotions and behaviours that may be causing you distress at work:

- Anger

- Anxiety

- Confidence/self-esteem issues

- Depression – withdrawal, feeling sad, loss of enjoyment

- Low frustration tolerance – impatient, angry

- Medicating yourself inappropriately

- Panic – feeling fearful

- Feelings and behaviours as a result of – illness, pain, and incapacity

- Struggles with relationship difficulties

- Unhelpful behaviours – eating, drinking, self harming

Identifying the emotions: You will then be encouraged to work out what emotions you are experiencing which are unsettling or distressing. (Check out Chapter 2 for how to start spotting and naming your negative feelings).

Working out the origin of the reasons for these feelings: There will always be a reason for a 'trigger' which sets you off worrying or feeling anxious, or angry or any other negative emotion. It may not be obvious at first but spending time working out what it is that sets off these feelings is an important step (you may find Chapter 3 helpful here).

Looking at your possible choices and options: You may think you are trapped and have no alternative paths to choose from. This in itself can set off negative thinking and feelings. There are always some choices, even if all of them are unattractive and hard to take. (Chapter 4 talks more about having options and making choices, for good or ill).

Deciding whether you want to work on changing the way you think about what’s happening for you: Sometimes you may decide that you are just going to put up with the difficult situations and decide you don't want to change. This is fine, you don't have to do anything. Having a look at the consequences of doing nothing, though, can be useful, as in the long term you may be setting yourself up for an even tougher journey in the future. Taking some time to consider all of this helps you make more informed choices. (Try Chapter 5 to think specifically about your problems in your workplace).

Learning and applying the CBT method of linking the feeling–thinking connection: If you decide you would like to work on reducing some of the negative feelings precipitated by your thinking, then you will need to learn the CBT methods to be able to apply them for yourself. Some people may choose to find a CBT therapist to teach them and others, like you, who is reading this book and is up for teaching yourself and ultimately helping you to be informed about CBT practice. (Chapter 7 is the place to start for using CBT at work).

Choosing to use CBT therapy doesn’t involve secrets or magic (no incantations featuring knee of newt or toe of toad!). You just make a conscious decision to learn and apply CBT to your troubles and to take responsibility for your own emotional wellbeing.

In certain situations, you can find that your choices are tough ones to make and you certainly won’t like some of the options available at work. But CBT works with you to look at the possible emotional and behavioural consequences of choosing to do nothing and carrying on upsetting yourself.

Often you can choose to ignore what’s happening, because it seems too painful or scary to admit the reality of the situation, but CBT helps you to pay attention to it and do something about it.

tip Seeing your options laid out in front of you, along with the ‘logic’ behind your irrational thinking and the consequences of continuing to think in a certain way, can be very enlightening.

As the old saying has it: ‘procrastination is the thief of time’. How often have you put something off until it becomes so urgent and pressing that the consequences start pushing over into a crisis? But then, after you attend to the task, you find that it wasn’t so bad after all and you wish that you hadn’t spent so long in a state of anxiety.

Tackling tough times with CBT

A core belief in CBT is that you can’t make changes without pain, which is why some people call it a tough therapy. It involves goals, guidelines, exercises, homework and the constant need to be ‘on your own case’. There is no change without pain.

You have to go through the discomfort zones to progress. (I discuss the specific issue of workplace changes in Chapters 13 and 17).

warning If you want to keep avoiding your problems – living in denial between episodes of distress, surrounded by the crutches of chocolate and hot drinks, and yet aware subconsciously that troubling moments at work lie around the corner – CBT won’t work for you. The fact is that you have to make CBT work for you.

CBT guides you through the process, however, because you work out what your unpleasant zones may be in advance of pushing yourself through them. You make the conscious decision to take on the necessary work yourself, in terms of changing your attitudes, and use appropriate coping strategies to see you through.

For example, imagine that your goal is to work alone on your company’s reception desk, but that the thought of dealing with members of the public (and their notorious unpredictability) terrifies you. CBT can help you to anticipate what the obstacles may be and how you may feel in advance, as well as to plan experiencing discomfort. No-one can experience the reality of stepping into the scary situation for you, though: you must do that yourself.

Recognising Problems in the Workplace

You have a core personality, partly determined by your genes, your environment and your upbringing (check out Chapter 9 for more details). Plus, how you present yourself varies in different situations. You may be aware of certain expectations of yourself in different roles, but essentially you remain the same person.

Finding out where you fit in and recognising your own work situation is helpful in identifying recurrent issues and potential struggles.

Experiencing conflict between your beliefs and actions

tip In order to be successful in the workplace, you need to be aware of what’s expected of you – because you can experience tension when this requirement doesn’t fit with who you are. The disquiet arises from a mismatch between what you’re thinking and how you’re being asked to behave. For example, you may feel angry at having to do some tasks or conform to certain working conditions and think that things just aren’t fair. You’d be correct.

But how hard you insist on gripping to your rigid views of how life ‘should’ be, bemoaning the fact that your work doesn’t measure up, is a large influence on how unsettled you feel at work.

remember CBT helps you to sort out this confusion. You don’t lose any sense of your true self and become an emotionless automaton with CBT, but you do find yourself making enlightened choices. I like to call this conscious compliance. You may not agree with something you need to do at work, but you do choose to comply, because ultimately doing so is in your best long-term interests.

Admitting your struggles

When you allow yourself to admit that things aren’t going along too well and that you’re struggling, you’ve made the first step towards doing something about it.

truestory I used to work for a company’s Employees Assistance Programme, taking calls on the confidential helpline. I know from experience that the hardest part of the process was for employees to pick up the phone and make the call to say they’d like some help.

Even calling your GP to make an appointment for a physical ailment can be tough, because you may feel that you have some weakness in yourself that you don’t want to have to admit. Sometimes, when you’ve spoken the words, you can feel that it’s all too real. But not attending to the warning signs leaves you open to the problem getting worse.

remember Saying ‘I’m struggling a bit here’ is perfectly okay. You’re likely to judge yourself much more harshly than your friends and co-workers do. When it comes to the crunch, if someone you work with gets a serious illness you often notice people’s genuine concern.

warning Emotional problems can progress into crises and become critical if you leave them unattended for a long time.

Looking after yourself at work

remember You have a responsibility to take care of yourself at work. Keeping yourself physically and emotionally healthy isn’t only in your best interests, but also in your employer’s and workmates’ too (as I describe in Chapter 5).

When you drag yourself into work when you aren’t feeling well, you’re often not met with sympathy and concern. Great relief is felt all round when someone else makes the decision and orders you to go home. Oh, the joy when your boss tells you not to come back until you’re better – though these moments are probably quite rare.

CBT can help you develop the confidence to recognise when you need time out to get yourself physically and mentally fit, and the skill to understand and rationalise why doing so is in your long-term best interests.

Discovering the Benefits of the CBT Problem-Solving Method

This book shows you enough CBT techniques to enable you to go off and apply them to your own situation. For example, Chapter 2 describes CBT’s basic principles and practical applications (which come in a handy ABC framework) and Chapter 3 talks you through building your own CBT portable toolkit for fixing your emotional problems. To help convince you of its benefits, I also include real-world stories of how people have used CBT successfully in the workplace. I draw them from my experience of working as a CBT therapist with hundreds of employees in the private and public sectors for more than 20 years.

remember CBT is an evidence-based theory, using scientific, logical and rational methods to construct, assess and test its effectiveness. It’s proved to help people reduce their debilitating emotional states. Many research papers show, for example, that CBT seems to have long-lasting effects in treating anxiety and depression, which may be due in part to the fact that people are encouraged to discover the therapy and help themselves to stay well over time.

Accountability in CBT through confidential assessment and monitoring is a key factor in many health organisations choosing to use CBT as their preferred method of providing emotional support to employees.

Increasing a company’s productivity and positivity

As CBT has gained in popularity, more companies and HR departments are recommending this therapy for their employees.

You can’t overestimate the financial advantages of keeping a workforce healthy and happy. Chapters 6 and 13–15 look at some of the benefits to an organisation of adopting strategies that keep stress levels to a minimum and offer support for stress-related issues.

tip During your work life you’re bound to experience struggles in your personal life that may then impact on your professional life. But the great thing about CBT is that knowledge of it is just as helpful for personal issues as work-related ones.

Being an ambassador for CBT

When you’ve got the hang of CBT and are actively using it in your life, you may find that work colleagues comment on the change in you: perhaps you seem more relaxed and they want to know how you manage to stay calm during a crisis. Of course, you know that using CBT is an active therapy. You appear calm because underneath you’re consciously going through the ABC technique, which I explain in Chapter 2, to be on the alert for feelings of rising panic in yourself. You can then rationalise your thoughts to keep that anxiety in check.

For those moments when co-workers ask you, Chapter 14 encourages you to become a CBT ambassador yourself! I’ve taught many a colleague some principles of CBT in coffee breaks who tell me that they still apply them years later.

Selecting the work life you want

remember One aim of using CBT is to have only a healthy concern for what’s happening around you, rather than a debilitating state of anxiety about events.

Work can make many demands on you, some of which may not be to your liking. You may need to fulfil those demands to keep your job, but CBT encourages you never to lose sight of who you are. Even in the harshest of conditions, people have kept their sense of values and personal beliefs. Viktor E Frankl was a survivor of the holocaust who endured terrible conditions. He’s quoted as saying:

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

CBT is about helping you to uncover your beliefs and attitudes and check whether they’re helping or hindering you. (Chapter 4 has loads of useful info on the importance of maintaining a healthy attitude at and about work, and Chapter 10 talks about creating your own philosophy on work.) You can always choose your own way (Chapter 12, in particular, shows you how).

Becoming balanced professionally and personally

The issue of striking a healthy work–life balance (which I cover in Chapter 16) is a concern across many countries and cultures. The blurred boundaries between work and personal life can impact heavily on people.

tip Make sure that your life isn’t dominated by work, if that’s not what you want. Check out how your life is working every now and again, and use CBT to help identify when you’re getting out of balance.

CBT suggests that you work towards an acceptance of some situations and events and not to upset yourself about things beyond your control. When you can truly accept some difficult things, and change the way you view them, you free yourself up to move forward.

Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.

—Albert Einstein

Chapter 2

Discovering How CBT Works

In This Chapter

arrow Getting to grips with CBT

arrow Considering the basics

arrow Using CBT to help yourself

People have visited doctors or healers of some sort for physical illnesses and injuries for centuries. Today, humans know more about their bodies and what to do when things go wrong than ever, and more professionally trained medical personnel are available.

People are also becoming increasingly familiar with the idea of seeking help when life gets to be an emotional struggle. Sometimes people’s mental health can become so adversely affected that they have difficulty coping with everyday life, let alone work. But the balance between merely having a tough time and becoming seriously anxious and depressed, resulting in an inability to function properly, varies from individual to individual.

When you experience struggles that affect your emotional state, you can be confused as to where to go for help, and even feel embarrassed – which is where cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) comes in. In this chapter, I describe CBT’s role, the basics of how it works and how it can help you improve your emotional wellbeing.

Understanding Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

remember CBT is a practical psychological strategy that takes into account people’s thinking, behaviours and emotions. It’s designed to help them bring about a change in their emotions, usually from an unsettled and unhelpful state to a calmer and less disturbed one. Healthcare organisations around the world are increasingly recognising and adopting CBT. It’s particularly favoured for helping people to address their struggles at work, and for helping them get back to work when they’ve had to take sickness absences or their performance at work is being affected by distracting emotional states.

As an accredited CBT practitioner offering and implementing CBT in the workplace for individuals and via training courses, I’ve found that CBT can be an extremely helpful strategy for workers to discover and implement.

remember A key aspect of CBT is that it shows individuals how to become their own therapist. It’s a highly practical therapy that explains and involves the subject. Individuals find out how to work out what’s happening for them and why they’re feeling the way they are, as well as strategies for reducing unsettling emotions.

Sometimes CBT is referred to as a brief therapy, because it doesn’t necessarily require months and years of attending weekly sessions: some people need only a few sessions to get the hang of it and successfully apply it to themselves. On average, depending on the emotional state of the individual, about six CBT sessions can be a good start to gain an understanding of CBT in order to start applying it for yourself. I routinely work with employees who find a couple of sessions helpful enough to redress the mild emotional imbalance they’ve been experiencing.

warning This book gives a background explanation of CBT theory and methods. It’s not intended to replace medical consultations and advice, which are very important. Emotional imbalances can vary in severity and you should always let your medical practitioner know when you’re experiencing troubling thoughts and emotions. This book isn’t a substitute for overall healthcare but an informed addition for your wellbeing library. Use it to help you gain more insight into yourself, particularly in the workplace.

Introducing the components of CBT

CBT is quite simple in concept:

Cognitive: How you think.

Behaviour: How you act.

Therapy: A conscious intention to bring about change.

remember CBT is about linking your thinking to your behaviours and deciding whether you want to change some unhelpful behaviours. It’s extremely effective at challenging everyday problems that affect people in the workplace and looking at ways to help reduce associated negative or ‘unhealthy’ feelings.

Some frequently occurring such feelings include (in no particular order):

Anger

Anxiety

Depression

Embarrassment

Guilt

Hurt

Low self-esteem

Self-doubt

Shame

People also experience many other feelings daily that come and go without people paying close attention to them.

Human beings are highly efficient information processors and are bombarded with information from the minute they wake up. Just think how many decisions you make automatically: washing, what to wear, what to eat, getting ready for work, and finding your way to work are just a few. If an app were able to monitor your feelings and display an ‘emotional graph’ at the end of each day, you’d amazed at the gamut of your emotions!

remember Here’s the thing though: only you know what you’re feeling – and half the time even you’re not sure! Identifying specific feelings can be difficult. You process unconsciously a lot of the time, but that doesn’t mean that your information input has no impact on your physiological and psychological systems. Even when you’re asleep, your brain is busy and active, sorting out information from the day’s events and making links with past ones.

tip Internal thinking triggered by your own thought processes and past stored memories all have an impact on your emotional state. In order to understand CBT, you have to be aware of all events that impact you.

Deciding whether you want to use CBT

Sometimes you can be so involved in lurching from day to day in order to survive that you don’t realise the adverse impact that activities are having. You don’t allow yourself to stop and acknowledge that you’re struggling, because the primary need to provide for yourself and others means that you can’t afford to ‘crumble’.

remember Deciding that you really want to make a change is key to successful CBT. You have to recognise, through your own insight or by another person’s prompting, that some of your current behaviours aren’t in your best interests.

Saying ‘yes’

The first step in deciding to seek therapy comes when you allow into your consciousness the fact that all isn’t well. More often than not, you start experiencing distressing symptoms of anxiety-related behaviours and realise for yourself that things aren’t right.

Or, perhaps at work, a friend takes you to one side and expresses his concern for you. This action is a hard thing for anyone to do, because conveying to you that he’s worried is difficult for both of you: you may feel as though you’re being criticised or judged, and he may worry that he may offend or upset you. Everyone can get defensive in such situations.

Or maybe your manager has a word with you about your performance, which triggers a decision to go to your GP. In some cases, if a person’s behaviour prompts concern that he may be a danger to himself, others or to the company, the employer may intervene in the employee’s own best interest.

remember Whatever the way in which you discover that you’re struggling, you need to admit it to yourself. The next big step is deciding whether you’re going to seek help. Realising that you aren’t performing at your best can feel alien and be quite a shock.

Facing stigmas

In some cultures and situations, particularly at work, people can feel that admitting that they’re struggling with emotional distress is a sign of weakness. People fear a professional and social stigma.

For example, people with impeccable work histories, who’ve worked efficiently, conscientiously and without any previous difficulties, may suddenly find themselves experiencing symptoms of stress. A common coping strategy is to enter a state of denial, which isn’t at all helpful.

The most helpful thing you can do for yourself is to allow yourself to accept that you are struggling; it is not a sign of weakness. The next step is to try to tell someone else that you are finding work difficult and that it is affecting your emotional state every day. It is okay to ask for help – you may be surprised at how willing other people are to listen.

Realising that you can change if you want

Most people in full-time work spend approximately 40 hours a week working, with many working a lot longer, depending on their job and the demands made upon them. The all-pervasive use of information technology means that employers can contact many workers 24 hours a day, as well as at weekends and on holidays.

In addition, unless you’re self-employed, your job role and requirements are usually externally imposed. You may have some input as to how and when you meet these demands, but your contract with your company is an agreement to fulfil its requirements.

Even if you are your own boss, the management of your own role and the success of your venture is reliant upon you meeting the demands required for the successful completion of projects.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, the issue of work–life balance is a potential source of difficulty and conflict for many people.

remember One of the major sources of unhappiness and distress is feeling trapped and powerless in a job. Not having control over your workload is a common predictor of workplace stress.

Fortunately, CBT can help you get your job in perspective. It can help you view your job and its demands in a healthy and manageable way so that you concentrate your energies on the things you can control and don’t engage in unhelpful worrying about issues and events beyond your control.

Meeting the ABCs of CBT

CBT evolved when psychologists who worked with people with emotional struggles came up with ideas as to why these problems arise (check out the nearby sidebar ‘A brief history of CBT’ for more).

In the following sections, I introduce you to some essential concepts of CBT, so that you can understand more about what CBT is and how it works, how to investigate your emotional responses, and how to correctly identify your feelings.

A brief history of CBT

Even though thousands of years ago the Ancient Greeks recognised that people could become out of sorts emotionally, not a huge amount of research was done into people’s moods until the 19th century (when Freud developed his psychoanalysis techniques). Over the following decades, other theories investigated how and why people experience negative and unhealthy emotions.

The 1950s witnessed moves to create theories and therapies that could include people’s thinking processes and combine those with the outward behaviours in which the people engaged. This psychological movement was called Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. One of the founding proponents was psychologist Aaron Beck. He noticed that depressed and anxious people seemed to think negatively, beginning a new line of investigation into emotional health.

Even before Beck, a psychoanalyst in New York called Albert Ellis had noticed that people who were upset with events in their lives tended to think in irrational ways: how they viewed themselves, their work and the world in general shared common themes. Ellis proposed that irrational thinking gave rise to unsettled emotions and, in fact, that people were upsetting themselves, and sometimes making themselves unwell.

The idea that people are upset not by events and people but by how they view those events or people was a new way of viewing mental health or ill-health.

Thinking scientifically

CBT is an evidence-based theory and therapy. It uses the widely understood and accepted scientific methods employed universally in other sciences. Psychology is still a relatively new science and, although the study of human behaviour isn’t the same as studying physics, chemistry or biology, individuals do exhibit common themes and often repeat patterns of behaviour and ways of thinking and acting.

remember If you do your own detective work and look for themes or patterns of thinking and consequently unhelpful behaviours, you can start to form your own hypothesis as to how you can change.

Think about it this way: if you don’t know any math, how can you be expected to work out your personal finances? Similarly, with emotional education: if you’ve never been taught how to use psychological methods to ease your emotional ill-health, helping yourself is going to be much harder.

Simplifying CBT methods

remember In general, people aren’t upset by what people say and do to them, or what happens at work and elsewhere in their lives; they upset themselves by their own thinking. Bearing this crucial distinction in mind, you can easily learn CBT techniques to help yourself.

Outlining the ABC framework

remember Here I describe the ABC model in CBT, which can help you work out accurately why you’re feeling unsettled:

A: Activating event.

B: Beliefs and thinking.

C: Emotional consequence.

tip Notice that B – your processing of the information and what you think about the event – comes between A and C.

Seeing the framework in action

Here’s a practical example to illustrate how people tend to think in this ABC way. Someone makes a round of cups of coffee in your office and leaves you out. Clearly, you feel a bit upset about it.

The activating event (A), no cup for