Ready to Improve Your Mental Health?-Try These CBT Strategies

Cognitive-behavioral therapy, also known as CBT, is a powerfuxl therapeutic tool for in-office and online therapy sessions. Together, you and your therapist at Suffolk DBT can use CBT strategies to untwist unhelpful, disruptive thought patterns.

You don’t have to limit yourself to doing CBT just when you visit your therapist; CBT is flexible, serving as a helpful tool both inside and outside the therapy room. Many of the interventions designed for CBT can be done in your own home, and the more you practice between sessions, the more therapy success you’re likely to have. 

CBT’s portability empowers you to implement CBT strategies every day, helping you see changes as they happen in both your mindset and your life.

Ready to improve your mental health? Try these CBT strategies:

Here are some of the most portable CBT strategies, useful in daily life to help you change your thoughts and actions in real time.

Journaling

One helpful CBT strategy is journaling every day. Journaling is a powerful practice that allows you to both explore your thought patterns and change them simultaneously.

For example, let’s say that you are anxious about how others perceive you. You can journal about a particular interaction, writing down what happened. You can then jot down your beliefs about how you perceived the situation. You might have felt the other person was judging you, for example.

Once those thoughts are on paper, focus on the facts; that you merely had a conversation with someone. Accept your emotions, but remind yourself that right now, everything is fine. This regular reflection helps you make long-lasting change in your beliefs, and physically writing with pen and paper helps with reinforcing those new beliefs, too.

Stress Management and Relaxation

Another way to incorporate CBT strategies into your daily life is by adopting a mindfulness practice. This approach helps you to manage stress and to stay calm.

When you wake up in the morning, take 5-10 minutes to perform some deep breathing exercises. Add in some reassuring thoughts or a daily meditation script to contemplate.

These mindfulness practices help you counterbalance thoughts like “today will turn out terrible” or other negative thinking patterns. Over time, you’ll be able to approach the morning with renewed energy and enthusiasm, rather than dread.

Using Role-Play to Practice New Skills

A helpful CBT strategy that helps you practice new skills and try out new perspectives is role-playing. You can  “try on” a thought pattern that you might never have used before when you role-play.

Think of it as trying on a new shirt or pair of pants. You’re unsure whether it will fit, so you want to test it out before you buy the item. The same is true in therapy in Suffolk county.

Sometimes we are hesitant to adopt a new thought pattern because we are unsure it will work. However, it’s much safer to role-play before using that thought pattern or skill in real life.

Create a scenario for yourself, and practice acting it out at home. Consider asking a trusted friend or family member to help you further your practice, so you can role-play in a scenario that still feels safe, but is closer to real-life situations.

Divide and Conquer Complex Tasks

It can be overwhelming to face a complex task that you need to complete, like a really in depth-project at work that needs to get done. You may struggle to know where to start, and the sheer number of steps and unknowns can make big projects seem far too overwhelming.

A helpful CBT strategy to try is breaking up these tasks into smaller, more reasonable chunks. Write out each task or step. Use a calendar to plot out which job you will get done on a particular day. Figure out who you’ll need help from, and when. This approach allows you to find the beginning, identify the middle, and know how the end will look. It also provides you with a game plan to accomplish the task. Start small, accomplishing one thing at a time, until the work is done.

Can you see how you could use all these CBT strategies in your everyday life? A major advantage of CBT is that many strategies are not meant to be restricted to the therapists’ office. Instead, they are also life-hacks that you can bring into your everyday routine. But you won’t have to figure out how to fit CBT into your daily life alone. When you start working with a Suffolk DBT therapist, they might provide you with an assignment to implement one of these strategies for the rest of the week. Over time, you’ll learn where to use these healthy strategies to cope with life’s stress, your anxiety, and more.

Learning CBT strategies with Suffolk DBT empowers you to rewrite your story, and your life

Suffolk DBT proudly provides quality cognitive behavior therapy and quality dialectical behavior therapy, a form of cognitive behavioral therapy, at their offices in Manhattan and Long Island, New York and online. Their experienced therapists specialize in serving teens, children, adults, and college students struggling with depression, borderline personality disorder, eating disorders, and self-harm. Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) skills and CBT strategies can both help you or your kids to manage emotions and work through life’s challenges. Suffolk DBT Manhattan and Long Island offer a free screening call so you can get started right away. 

Frequently Asked Questions About Cognitive Behavior Therapy