Cognitive Restructuring is a core technique in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the most well-studied and effective approach to treating common mental health issues like anxiety and depression.

What is Cognitive Restructuring?

Cognitive Restructuring is based on the principle of cognitive mediation which says that how we feel emotionally is not the result of what happens to us, but instead, it’s the result of how we think about what happens to us.

The Principle of Cognitive Restructuring

<ul><li>It helps us get organized mentally</li><li>It forces us to slow down</li><li>It helps us be more aware</li><li>It gives us a sense of agency and control</li><li>It helps us think more clearly and rationally</li><li>It helps us reflect instead of reacting</li><li>It breaks bad mental habits</li></ul>

Why it works?

If we want to feel better on a regular basis, we need to figure out a way to change how we habitually think about and interpret what happens to us.

The benefits of Cognitive Restructuring are many and diverse:<ul><li>Manage worry and anxiety better</li><li>Break out of rumination and depression spirals</li><li>More effective stress relief</li><li>Avoid procrastination and be more productive</li><li>Improve communication and relationships</li><li>Increased optimism and outlook</li><li>Help with addiction and sobriety issues</li><li>Build assertiveness and self-confidence</li><li>Cultivate empathy and self-compassion</li><li>Gain increased self-awareness and personal insight</li></ul>

Practical Benefits of Cognitive Restructuring

A Thought Record simply a guide for walking you through the specific elements and steps of Cognitive Restructuring.This "template" is composed of 6 steps:<ol><li>Pause: What happened here?</li><li>Trigger: Who, What, When, Where, Why?</li><li>Thoughts: What thoughts were running through my mind immediately after the trigger?</li><li>Emotions: What emotions am I feeling right now? On a scale from 1 to 10, how intense are they?</li><li>Alternative thoughts: What are some alternative-ideally, mode realistic-ways of interpreting what happened?</li><li>Re-rate emotions: How intense are my emotions now?</li></ol>

Introducing the Thought Record

Cognitive Distortions are unrealistic, exaggerated, and generally inaccurate forms of self-talk.These habitual inaccuracies or distortions in the way we think tend to create distortions in how we feel.

What are Cognitive Distortions?

<ul><li>Mind reading: assuming we understand what other people are thinking without any evidence.</li><li>Overgeneralization: extending the evidence for something beyond what is appropriate.</li><li>Magnification: taking our errors and exaggerating them.</li><li>Emotional reasoning: making decisions based on our feelings.</li><li>Black & white thinking: evaluating things in terms of extreme categories.</li><li>Labeling: describing ourselves in one extreme way, usually negative.</li><li>Should statements: self-talking about what we should and should not do.</li></ul>

Examples of Cognitive Distortions

How can we deal with negative thinking? Psychology suggests that we should try to train our minds to think more positively about what happens to us.

Decrease worry, jugmentalness, and other negative thinking patterns with Cognitive Restructuring, a powerful technique from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

The Complete Guide to Cognitive Restructuring

It can be harsh, but you’re not going to make better driving decisions by blocking the windshield. Set appropriate goals and don’t see threats, see challenges

Embrace Reality

We don’t feel confident and act, we act and feel confident. Be honest about your weaknesses so you can compensate for them. Focus on your average performance to make progress without disappointment

Boost Confidence

Without a feeling of control, we lose motivation. Realize you always have a choice. Create a starting ritual

Find Control

Don’t ignore your feelings. Accept and label emotions. See feelings as information, not dictators

Respond Instead of React 

In the end, the only motivation that matters comes from meaning. A greater purpose or the support of others. Gimme a high-five, willya?

Transcend Discomfort

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Most people spend so much time trying to understand their low self-esteem, that they don’t have any energy left to build higher self-esteem. If you want better self-esteem, focus on identifying and building consistent habits that will improve your self-esteem. Here are four pretty good ones to start with.

Self-esteem is something you can build with better habits.

The people you consistently spend time with affect your wellbeing and self-esteem too. If you constantly hang around people who don’t particularly like you, that’s gonna rub off and it’s going to be harder to like yourself more. On the other hand, if you spend a lot of time with people who genuinely like you and enjoy spending time with you, it’s going to be much easier to like yourself more.

1. Spend More Time with People You Actually Enjoy

Self-talk is a behavior. It’s something we do. And sometimes, it’s something we do so often that it becomes a habit. If you’re constantly cruel to yourself, you’re going to feel the same as if another person was constantly cruel to you. The best way to undo a habit of overly negative self-talk is to focus on one simple idea: gentleness.Be gentle with yourself and you’ll find it a lot easier to like yourself.

2. Practice Gentle Self-Talk

Having clear values means you have a well-defined vision for the things that matter most to you. The term values includes everything from traditional virtues like honesty and integrity all the way down to more mundane but still important commitments like maintaining your physical health through exercise or spending quality time with good friends.When your values are unclear, there’re not very motivating.

3. Clarify Your Values

People with low self-esteem are usually really good at keeping their promises to other people and really bad at keeping promises to themselves. They’re so concerned with other people’s wants and needs that they end up constantly compromising what they want. And when this compromise becomes a habit, their self-esteem takes a serious hit.True self-esteem comes from balancing the wants and needs of others with the wants and needs of yourself.In order to feel good about yourself, make sure you’re putting fuel in your own tank. And the best ways to do that is to keep your promises to yourself.

4. Keep Your Promises to Yourself

4 Simple Habits for Better Self-Esteem

You must be yourself. This means asking for what you want, setting boundaries, having your own beliefs and opinions, standing up for your values, wearing the clothes you want to wear, eating the food you want to eat, saying the things you want to say, and in a hundred other ways being you and not somebody small or false.

1. Be yourself

You come with attributes, capacities and proclivities and you are molded in a certain environment. But at some point you must say, “Okay, this is what is original to me and this is how I have been formed but now who do I want to be?” You reduce your emotional distress by deciding to become a person who will experience less emotional distress: a calmer person, a less critical person, a less egoistic person, a more productive person, a less self-abusive person, and so on.

2. Invent yourself

Part of our nature requires solitude, alone time, and a substantial rugged individualism. But this isn’t the whole story of our nature. We feel happier, warmer and better, live longer, and experience life as more meaningful if we love and let ourselves be loved. We must be individuals (see tips 1 and 2) but we must also relate. To do both, to both be ourselves and relate, requires that we acknowledge the reality of others, include others in our plans, not only speak but listen, and makes ourselves fit by eliminating our more egregious faults and by growing up.

3. Love and be loved

Nothing causes more emotional distress than the thoughts we think. We must do a better job than we usually do of identifying the thoughts that don’t serve us, disputing them and demanding that they go away, and substituting more useful thoughts. Thinking thoughts that do not serve you is the equivalent of serving yourself up emotional distress. Only you can get a grip on your own mind; if you won’t do that work, you will live in distress.

4. Get a grip on your mind

10 Tips for Emotional Healing

We are not so completely in control of our being that we can prevent past sore points from returning. They have a way of pestering us as anxious sweats, nightmares, sudden sadness, and waves of anger or defeat. But we can nevertheless try to exorcise the past by not playing along with our human tendency to wallow there. We must tell ourselves to move on and mean it. If you have a secret attachment to misery, you will feel miserable. As best you can, imperfectly but with real energy, let go of the past and forget the past.

5. Forget the past

Rampant anxiety ruins our equilibrium, colors our mood, and makes all the already hard tasks of living that much harder. There are many anxiety management strategies you might want to try—breathing techniques, cognitive techniques, relaxation techniques, and so on—but what will make all the difference is if you can locate that “inner switch” that controls your anxious nature and, deciding that you prefer to live more calmly. No longer over-dramatize, that you will no longer catastrophize, that you will no longer live a fearful life or create unnecessary anxiety for yourself.

6. Flip the anxiety switch off

Meaning is nothing more arcane than a certain sort of subjective psychological experience. We can have much more meaning in our life if we stop looking for it, as if it were lost or as if someone else knew more about it than we did, and realize that it is in our power to influence meaning and even make it. By making daily meaning investments and by seizing daily meaning opportunities we hold meaning crises at bay and experience life as meaningful. Meaning problems produce severe emotional distress and learning the art of value-based meaning-making dramatically reduces that distress.

7. Make meaning

You can decide that the meaning you make is more important to you than the mood you find yourself in. You start each day by announcing to yourself exactly how you intend to make meaning on that day, how you intend to deal with routine chores and tasks, how you intend to relax—how, in short, you mean to spend your day—and you consider all of that, the rich and the mundane alike, as the project of your life, one that you are living with grace and in good spirits. You reduce your emotional distress by checking in more on your intentions and less on your mood.

8. Let meaning trump mood

You may not be the person you would like to be. You may be angrier than you would like to be, more impulsive, more scattered, more self-sabotaging, more undisciplined, more frightened. If so, you require a personality upgrade, which of course only you can supply. You choose a feature of your personality you would like to upgrade and then you ask yourself, what thoughts align with this intention and what actions align with this intention? Then you think the appropriate thoughts and take the necessary action. In this way, you become the person capable of reducing your emotional distress.

9. Upgrade your personality

Circumstances matter. Our economic circumstances matter; our relationships matter; our work conditions matter; our health matters; whether our nation is at peace or occupied by invaders matters. Many circumstances are completely out of our control and many are within our control. We can change jobs or careers, we can divorce, we can reduce our calorie intake, we can stand up or keep quiet, we can do exactly as much as we can do to improve our circumstances. As a result of those improvements, we feel emotionally better. Emotional healing requires that you take real action in the real world.

10. Deal with circumstances

“Emotion is created by a cause, whether that cause is factual or imaginary does not matter, as longer as the believer holds it as true.”― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

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What really helps us reduce our sadness, anxiety, and other emotional distress?

Make an effort to remember that you live today; not ancient times.In earlier ages, people had to make more split, life or death decisions about whether to engage with or avoid the unknown. Thus, their brains evolved to pay a lot more natural attention to negative and dangerous stimuli.Individuals have a degree of control over their thoughts. Make a conscious effort to spend time contemplating the positive.

1. Remember that your brain was built for an earlier era.

Make a constant and concerted effort to experience gratitude, instead of allowing less happy moments to dominate your perception.Creating positive feelings of appreciation, helps to smooth out the peaks and troughs that naturally occur between happy experiences. Reducing how often you find yourself feeling that you're no longer happy, in turn reduces the stress that results from feeling that you should be.

2. Train yourself to focus on gratitude

Two key components of happiness (or subjective well-being) are:The balance of emotions: Everyone experiences both positive and negative emotions, feelings, and moods. Happiness is generally linked to experiencing more positive feelings than negative.Life satisfaction: This relates to how satisfied you feel with different areas of your life including your relationships, work, achievements, and other things that you consider important.Understanding this simple quirk in how our brains work can make it a bit more likely that we'll actually achieve happiness in our lifetimes. (Kendra Cherry)

3. Think about what happiness actually means

"Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." But what if the pursuit itself makes happiness less likely?

The Complete Guide to Cognitive Restructuring

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