Health & Balance
This article is from the WebMD Feature Archive
Do Your Thoughts Drag You Down?
May 22, 2000 -- Dawn H. is a successful banker who got hit with four downsizings in the last six years. Although she found a new position each time, the repeated stress soon undermined her confidence and sent her spiraling into depression. "I was a vice president and making a good salary, yet all I saw was that I was going to be out of a job," she says.
Dawn had been in counseling for years, but this time her therapist couldn't seem to help. Eventually, she grew so depressed she was admitted to a hospital. It could have been the worst of times, but it turned out to be the best. A staff member suggested Dawn try cognitive therapy, a form of short-term treatment that helps patients analyze their own thoughts, rather than rely on therapists for months, even decades.
By Gretchen Rubin I'm a real gold-star junkie. One of my worst qualities is my insatiable need for credit; I always want the recognition, the praise, that gold star stuck on my homework. Recently, I was grumbling to my mother about the fact that some extraordinarily praiseworthy effort on my part had gone unremarked upon. My mother wisely responded, "Most people probably don't get the appreciation they deserve." That's right, I realized — for instance, my mother herself! I certainly don't give her...
Read the The Power of Praise article > >
"Finally," Dawn says, "someone gave me some practical tools."
Quick, Inexpensive Treatment
Cognitive therapy has become the fastest growing, most extensively studied form of therapy in the United States -- the new century's treatment of choice for everything from depression to substance abuse. Pick up a health magazine or turn on the radio, and you'll likely hear about some new study in which cognitive therapy helped patients just as well -- or even better -- than drugs did. Even the insurance companies love this "therapy du jour," for an understandable reason: It usually takes just 10 or 12 sessions to see results, at a cost of about $1,500 -- peanuts compared to the cost of long-term psychotherapy.
What, exactly, is cognitive therapy? And why does it apparently work so well? Simply put: Cognitive therapists believe that the way we think shapes our emotions. If we expect the worst to happen and routinely focus on the negative, this can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
For instance, Dawn went into job interviews thinking, "If I don't get this position, nobody will want to hire me." Another person might respond more pragmatically, "If I don't get this job, I'll find out why and be better prepared next time."
After Dawn learned to change the way she thought, she was eventually able to change her emotions -- and her life.
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