When we’re having a panic attack, or starting to feel anxious, our breathing often speeds up. We may even start to hyperventilate, or feel like we can’t breathe and are going to suffocate. The key to calming our breathing when we’re feeling anxious or starting to panic isn’t to breathe deeper, which can actually make things worse, but to breathe slower. This breathing exercise is a great way to slow down our breathing, by breathing out for twice as long as we breathe in.
Assertive Communication and Interpersonal Effectiveness in DBT
Interpersonal Effectiveness is one of the core elements of DBT, and assertive communication is key to the objectives effectiveness skill in DBT. Learn how to communicate assertively with the DEAR MAN technique.
Assertive Communication and Interpersonal Effectiveness in DBT
Automatic Negative Thoughts in CBT
Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTs) are the spontaneous negative thoughts we have in response to unpleasant experiences, events or triggers. Our automatic negative thoughts have a big impact on our moods and how we feel. To learn more about ANTs, please watch the video below.
Automatic Negative Thoughts and CBT
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CBT Thought Record: Change Your Negative Thinking
In cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), the thought record or thought diary is the main tool we use to modify automatic negative thoughts. Watch the video below to learn how you can use the thought record to change the way you think to change the way you feel. You can download a couple of different versions of the thought record or diary from the links below the video.
CBT Thought Record: Modify Automatic Negative Thoughts
Thought records can be difficult to complete at first. The video below helps troubleshoot potential challenges and offers some tips to make the thought record more effective. Read More
Cognitive Distortions in CBT
Cognitive distortions are our exaggerated and/or negatively biased patterns of thinking that lead to us perceiving reality inaccurately. Cognitive distortions have a big effect on our moods, and contribute to depression, anxiety, stress, anger, and all sorts of other issues.
In the video below you’ll learn to identify a number of cognitive distortions such as: all or nothing thinking, overgeneralization, mental filters, discounting the positive, jumping to conclusions, mind reading, fortune telling, magnification and minimization, catastrophizing, emotional reasoning, labeling, and personalization. Then you’ll learn how to modify your cognitive distortions and make your thinking less negative.
Cognitive Distortions in CBT
Depression Self Help: Treat and Manage Depression With CBT
Learn how to treat and manage depression with these self help strategies from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and mindfulness based cognitive therapy (MBCT), two of the most effective treatments for depression. We’ll look at how changes in behavior via behavioral activation can help ease depression, how changing our thoughts and how we relate to our thought with cognitive restructuring and mindfulness can help us start feeling less depressed, and how we can manage our emotions when we’re struggling with depression.
Depression Self Help: 6 Tips to Treat and Manage Depression
DBT Skills: Wise Mind, Emotional Mind and Reasonable Mind
Wise Mind is a core dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT) mindfulness skill. In DBT, wise mind is one of three states of minds we can operate out of. Through wise mind we can access our inner wisdom and intuition, but in order to comprehend what we mean by wide mind, it’s helpful to first understand the other two states of mind, reasonable mind, and emotional mind, also known as simple emotion mind. Watch the video below to learn more:
DBT Skills: Wise Mind, Emotion Mind and Reasonable Mind
CBT and DBT Skills: Behavioral Activation, Opposite Action for Depression
Behavioral Activation is a CBT technique that uses opposite action, one of the emotion regulation dialectical behavior skills. to help us improve our mood by changing our behavior.
When we’re feeling depressed we tend to not want to do much of anything, which only leaves us feeling more depressed. With behavioral activation, we work on increasing our level of activity by engaging in activities that give us a sense of pleasure, achievement, and/or social connection. Behavioral activation is one of the most effective things we can do to help lift our mood and start to pull ourselves out of a period of feeling depressed.
CBT, Behavioral Activation and Depression
Managing Panic Attacks With Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
Panic attacks, also known as anxiety attacks, are sudden and intense waves of anxiety that can leave you worried you’re having a heart attack, about to pass out, going crazy, or with any number of other fears that something is seriously wrong with your health. Panic attacks are terrifying in isolation, and panic disorder occurs when panic attacks arise on a regular basis.
The most effective treatment for panic attacks and panic disorder is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT. In the videos below, learn how anxiety escalates into a panic attack, and how you can use CBT to defuse a panic attack and make it less likely you have panic attacks in the future.
The 5-4-3-2-1 Grounding Exercise for Panic, Anxiety and Emotions
The 5-4-3-2-1 grounding technique is a great coping exercise to calm panic attacks, anxiety, stress, or if we’re feeling overwhelmed. In the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding exercise, we reconnect with the world around us by engaging our senses and looking at five things, touching four things, listening to three things, smelling two things, and tasting one thing.