One of my own cognitive weaknesses is that I don’t look at overviews. If I had, I would have recognized the structure which Laurie Santos chose for this round of her Science of Wellbeing course for teens. Unlike the first course, this version is structured into a cognitive behavioral framework. I am excited about this because I love cognitive behavioral therapy. It is one of my specialties, and also, it happens to be so hot right now.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), at its heart, involves the notion that many of our difficulties can be addressed by looking at the interplay between our behaviors, our thoughts, and our emotions. Aaron Beck introduced the concepts of CBT in the late 1960s and what is revolutionary about it is the realization that the way we think about and interpret events drives our reactions to those events. For example:
If I was attacked by a dog when I was little, I might be afraid of dogs. When I see a dog coming towards me, my alarm bells go off and I think: “This dog is going to hurt me.” As a result, my heart beats faster, my palms sweat, I feel fear and I walk the other way. Even more problematic, my fear reactions and anxiety might cause the dog to be anxious and aggressive, thereby reinforcing my fears and future reactions.
On the other hand, if I was raised with 5 sweet dogs, my thought when I see a dog approach is much different. It might be: “Oh how cute, come on over!” Because of this, my palms don’t sweat, my heart stays steady, I approach the dog, and I feel great and the dog responds in kind.
We can take this basic principle and apply it to our own lives with greater and greater complexity. For example: If a friend breaks a date with me, one thought might be: “I knew this would happen, they don’t actually like me. I’m boring to be around.” This thought leads me to feel bad about myself, it strengthens my belief that I am not likable, and this, in turn, leads me not to reach out to make more plans. This behavior leads to less contact with friends, which further reinforces my belief that I am not likable.
What is amazing about cognitive behavioral therapy is that the triad (thoughts, behaviors, and emotions) is flexible. We can have a feeling that creates a thought which leads to a behavior, we can have a behavior which leads to a thought that creates a feeling, and we can have behavior that leads to a feeling which creates a thought. This does make us complex to understand, but it also means that we can affect positive change on ourselves by tackling change in any one of these areas. And that is how (and WHY) Laurie Santos arranged her course this way.
We just finished class three, which was all about the BEHAVIORS we can employ to increase our happiness. This next class is focused on the THOUGHTS we can turn to, and class five is concerned with EMOTIONS that make us happy. Brilliant structure. I'm so pleased.
You might be asking yourself how you can apply this triad idea to yourself, or to a friend with a problem, or to your parents! Let’s give it a whirl here, and then you can do some on your own:
One of my regular problems is procrastination. I love to put things off. For example, if I have a work item to complete that involves more than one step (or that I don’t yet know how to do). The feeling I experience is glum, annoyed, vaguely unsettled, or downright cross. The thought I have is often: “I don’t want to do this” or “this is going to be too hard.” The behavior I have is….watching Ted Lasso, making myself a smoothie, or just sitting on the couch obstinately not doing my work..
I could intervene with myself on any of the three prongs of the cognitive triangle and create some change. I can change my thought: “This new challenge is going to feel great when it’s done.” I can change my feeling: This often requires me to hold two feelings at once, both the dread of doing the thing, and also whatever feeling is necessary to create some action for me; like determination or integrity. Finally, I could simply intervene on the behavior side: just start the darn thing and usually it rolls to the finish.
Let’s do one more but focus on the ways the cognitive triangle keeps us stuck in a feeling or state, in this case, let’s go with depression. Depression attacks your brain and body in so many different areas that it makes it really hard to function normally. These changes in your body (such as sleeping too much) and mind (such as persistent feelings of guilt) lead to a range of feelings that include anxiety, neediness, vulnerability, incompetence, sadness, guilt, tiredness, etc. These feelings, coupled with the body effects of depression, easily lead to thoughts about lack of worth, inability to get better, and many others. The cognitive triangle works to reinforce itself: the behaviors, thoughts, and feelings associated with depression all serve to keep you depressed.
An intervention of the triangle here could start on behavior: engage in exercise for 20 minutes daily even though your body doesn’t want it, even just walking outside. It could be in the area of your thoughts: using radical acceptance along with self-compassion to shift yourself away from thoughts of worthlessness and towards thoughts of encouragement, patience, and self-tending. For feelings, an intervention might look like shifting the emotion of depression and pushing it towards grief or opening yourself to feeling community, to receiving compassion, or feeling empathy towards others.
Slowly stacking up behaviors, thoughts, and generating feelings that run counter to depression are some of the key ingredients in breaking the episode and moving towards healing and recovery (in this situation along with a trained therapist).
So this is the basic structure of cognitive behavioral therapy. Here I would like to note one more concept, which is cognitive distortions (or thought errors that are probably the next most important piece of this approach. I don’t want to run on, so I’ve added them as a handout for you to explore on your own: :Cognitive Distortions Handout (uci.edu) In the next newsletter we will explore the thoughts that make us happy.
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