Cognitive Interventions.

Let’s say your boss came into the office one morning and didn’t say hi to you. You immediately notice a surge of anxiety and shame and your mind starts handing you thoughts such as “you see, she hates you”, “you are clearly the worst employee and such a failure”; “you’re probably going to be the first one to get fired the next time layoffs come around.”

Cognitive interventions include:

• Look at your thoughts

• Evaluate whether what you are saying to yourself has validity based on the available facts

• If you were making assumptions, CBT would ask you to think about other ways to see this situation

  • For example, “There is no evidence that my boss not saying hi to me has anything to do with me, perhaps something else is going on here.”
    

  The important point here is that CBT helps people see that the situation itself doesn’t dictate our emotions, it’s our thoughts about situations that often influence how feel.

Behavioral Interventions.

The therapy often also takes a behavioral focus, as the name Cognitive Behavioral Therapy would suggest. 

Behavioral interventions include:

• Exposure to situations or things that someone may be avoiding because of fear

• Behavioral experiments, which are intentionally designed exercises to check out the accuracy of one’s thinking

• Behavioral Activation to help individuals break patterns that maintain mood symptoms

• Contingency management to guide establishment of new behavioral patterns

• Skill Building to establish new behavioral repertoires

• Acceptance- and Mindfulness- Based Interventions
  

  The important point here is that CBT also helps people to find ways to engage in different behavioral patterns to help influence changes in thoughts and emotional experiences.