Changing Negative Beliefs with Behavioral Experiments in CBT

one of the main concepts in cognitive behavioral therapy is that our thoughts are a big influence on how we feel and our negative moods and emotions are often the result of and maintained by our negative thoughts and if we can change our negative thoughts to make them less negatively biased and better reflect reality then we'll experience a corresponding change in our moods and emotions and they'll become less negative as well and we'll start to feel better and we modify our negative thoughts with a technique called cognitive restructuring and i have lots of videos you can check out about negative thoughts and cognitive restructuring that you can find on my site selfhelptunes.com so please check that out but often even if we're able to modify our thoughts to make them less negative the change is just temporary and particularly when we find ourselves in situations where we're feeling sad or anxious or stressed or angry or some other negative emotion we don't always believe these new thoughts sometimes they look good on paper and seem reasonable and logical but when we try to rely on these new thoughts to help ourselves feel better we're skeptical these new less negative thoughts may no longer make sense in the face of strong negative emotions one reason this happens is that our thoughts tend to be mood congruent in other words when we're sad we have sad thoughts when we're anxious we have anxious thoughts when we're angry we have angry thoughts and so on so even if we've done some cognitive restructuring and have modified how we want and plan to think in these situations when we're experiencing a strong negative emotion by default our automatic thoughts are going to be negative in a way that reflects that emotion and it can be difficult to believe or even remember the less negative thoughts that made sense when we weren't feeling this way and another reason these new thoughts we're trying to instill in ourselves don't always stick around is that our beliefs are resistant to change so if we've been thinking a certain negative way for years changing these thoughts takes a while and new ways of thinking usually require some concrete evidence to back them up now some of this evidence can come from past experiences we've had where the negative thoughts we held to be true turned out not to be that accurate in certain situations and we can also look for new evidence that naturally arises in the course of our everyday lives for example if there's something coming up that we're anxious about and we tell ourselves it's probably not going to be as bad as i think and even if intellectually that seems true to us it can still be hard to believe not to sound cliched but it's like we know it in our heads but we don't really feel it in our hearts but then if what we were anxious about turns out to actually not be as bad as we'd feared the next time we find ourselves in a similar situation the thought this probably won't be as bad as i think is going to be easier for us to believe because now we have some data and evidence from our real lives to back it up but often we'll still need more evidence in order to replace a negative thought we've held for years with a less negative and more accurate way of looking at things so in that case we can set up behavioral experiments to try to gather more evidence that either supports or doesn't support are new less negative thoughts so let's look at how to set up a behavioral experiment with some examples so we start by writing down our old habitual automatic negative thoughts so let's say we have trouble being assertive and often have some thoughts like if i ask someone for something they'll get annoyed with me it's better just not to say anything and then the new thought we're testing is something like it's okay to ask people for something so now we need to create a behavioral experiment to test this hypothesis or new thought and if it's our first experiment testing out this new thought we want to pick something that's not going to cause us too much anxiety and where the stakes are relatively low so we can feel comfortable enough to make sure we go through with it and we decide that next time we go out to eat we're going to find a reason to send some of our food back and then we predict what we think is going to happen so maybe it's something like well they'll do what i ask because i have to but i'll be able to tell they're annoyed and then we run the experiment so we get our meal and when the server asks how everything is we say our food is a little bit cold and we'd like to have it reheated and then we note the outcome of the experiment in this case the server was friendly apologized got our food reheated and brought it back to the table and of course we left a big tip for involving them in our experiment and then we note how much the outcome supports the thought we were testing and in this case it supports it close to a hundred percent and then we ask ourselves what have i learned from this experiment so we've learned that it can be okay to ask someone for something and there aren't necessarily going to be any negative consequences and this was a really simple example but that's what we're aiming for if the experiment had been something like ask our bosses for a raise just the thought of doing that at this stage is probably going to make us too anxious and we'll back out before we even have a chance to run the experiment so we need to start with small manageable experiments and now that we have some data some evidence that backs up the thought it is okay to ask someone for something we'll need to run additional experiments before we fully believe that thought or can believe that thought in situations where the stakes are a little bit higher and so the next experiment needs to go a little bit further and as we continue to get more evidence that it's okay to ask people for something eventually we'll get comfortable enough and confident enough in this new thought we'll be able to take on things that are more daunting like asking our bosses for a raise let's look at another example when we're feeling depressed we can withdraw from the world and not want to do anything but that usually just leaves us feeling even more depressed and one of the reasons it's so hard to get ourselves to do things is that we're having thoughts like i feel too bad or too tired to do anything what's the point i don't even enjoy anything anymore why even bother and if we try to tell ourselves if i do something maybe i'll feel better we might know intellectually that this is probably true but in the moment when we're feeling really depressed deep down we just don't believe it enough to be able to act on it so we can set up an experiment to test this thought and try to do it and see what happens so maybe it's texting a friend to meet up for coffee and then we predict what the outcome will be i might feel a little better but it's not really going to change anything so then we run the experiment and we go for coffee with a friend and afterwards we evaluate the results and maybe it felt good to get out and be around someone else and we actually did enjoy ourselves a bit and feel better than we'd expected so this experiment supported our thought if i do something i might feel a little bit better let's say 70 percent and what have we learned from this experiment well even when i'm depressed and don't want to do anything if i actually do do something i often do start to feel a little better and so the next time we're feeling really depressed maybe it's less difficult to get ourselves to do something because we have some data from this experiment to support the idea that if we do do something we will feel a little better or maybe the results of the experiment weren't that positive we found it hard to be around someone else and we couldn't wait for it to be over so we could go home again so in that case maybe the experiment supported our thought zero percent or even negative percent because maybe we felt a little bit worse so in this scenario we could conclude that our thought if i do something when i'm depressed i might feel a little better is wrong and we go back to believing that when we're depressed we just feel too bad to do anything there's no point i need to just lie in bed until i feel better but that would be jumping to conclusions based on the results of just one experiment and we really don't have enough data yet to decide to give up on our new thought so instead we can adjust our new thought a bit when i'm really depressed i find it too hard to be around other people but maybe there are other things i can do that can help me feel a little better so then we set up a different experiment to test this thought or hypothesis and we choose the less ambitious activity and decide okay i'm going to get up and take a shower and then have a cup of coffee by myself at home and see how i feel and we predict that we might feel a little bit better and we do it and we actually do feel better and now we have some data that supports the thought when i'm feeling depressed doing something can help me feel a little better as long as they don't try to take on too much and this we can support for our old thought that when we're feeling depressed there's just no point in doing anything and then once we do feel a little better we can experiment with new thoughts like if i do one small thing and feel a little better maybe i can build on that and do a little bit more and the example we just described is what we do in behavioral activation one of the best ways to treat depression and i have a whole video about behavioral activation if you'd like to learn more so behavioral experiments are a great way to gather evidence to support new thoughts that we're trying to instill in ourselves because they provide us with data to back up these new thoughts and this helps us start believing these thoughts deep down instead of just understanding them intellectually and as we internalize these new thoughts they can start to become our habitual reactions and automatic thoughts rather than our old automatic negative thoughts that have such a negative and detrimental effect on our moods and how we feel so please check out my site selfhelptunes.com where you'll find all of my videos on cognitive behavioral therapy along with a number of worksheets that help reinforce the ideas in the videos including a worksheet for behavioral experiments and if you haven't already please hit the like button and subscribe to my channel so you don't miss out on any of the new videos i have coming up

Channel: Self-Help Toons

Views: 17,106

Keywords: behavioural experiments, cbt, core beliefs, negative thoughts

Id: xRcLF70Mbz0

Length: 10min 31sec (631 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 08 2021