How Thoughts And Feelings Interact - How Does Cbt Work?
We know that thoughts and feelings interact. But how do they do so? Why is it important that we know?
We are thinking all the time in two ways. The first is the obvious one. It is the headlight attention thought. It focuses on the subject that we are paying attention to.
But we are always aware of our surroundings. We have a sort of scan or radar scanning what is going on. It may be something in our vicinity. But it may be a relevant subject. Say we are nearing an exam.
This scanning process defines the importance of the subject that it is scanning. It has three levels of grading. The first is to tell us that the subject is of no significance. It is virtually telling the headlight attention ‘there is no need to refocus.’
The next level is ‘Well I am not too sure ‘. ‘You can stay focused but I am putting you on standby’. This is object or event is labeled. But how is this done? By marking it with an emotion. So we have one subject in our ‘headlight’ but a feeling can occur. We are unaware of why we are feeling it. Obviously the event in the ‘headlight’ too can evoke an emotion. The event in the ‘headlight’ can evoke subjects associated with it to appear in the ‘scan’.
We are subject to a range of emotions. Many of which we are completely unaware of the source.
Now some people do this labeling process badly. They tend to over emphasize the possibility of something happening. Events are given emotions where they need not be.
We know this person. He is the worrier, the over conscientious, ever ready guy we all know. He is permanently tense. Happiness for him is not being unhappy. Relaxation is the absence of tension. Eventually he may well develop depression or anxiety.
Now we know the problem can we find a solution?
CBT – Cognitive Behavioural Therapy – is that solution. CBT allows us to examine easily the thoughts that were previously ‘hidden’. On doing so they are automatically corrected. More so we can see that very often the same thought and emotion occur. People can rapidly discover traits. They can readily correct theses traits.
Online Self-Help was designed to specifically help correct erroneous traits.
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Tags: anxiety, cbt, Depression, myray, online self-help, Stress
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