Garratt A Practical Guide to CBT for Work A Practical Guide to CBT for Work

Enjoying Work Is Easy as CBT
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-84831-435-1
Verlag: Icon Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

Reihe: Practical Guide Series

Maximize your happiness in the workplace.  Stop negative thinking and tackle your problems at work using Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). Learn to control anger and frustration, reduce workplace anxiety and take control of your work-life balance by introducing CBT's insights into your working day.   Full of real-life examples and useful exercises, this Practical Guide will help you to replace feelings of inadequacy and a lack of motivation with new ways of thinking, to help you work better with others, and make you happier and more effective in the workplace.

Gill Garratt is a psychologist and accredited practitioner in CBT therapy with twenty year experience. She has used CBT in settings including factories, offices, global financial organisations, central government and even prisons and cruise ships.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Garratt, Gill

Leseproben

Introduction

What is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy or CBT?

Epictetus

Having picked this book up you may already have heard a little about Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. CBT has become very popular in the 21st century, with research showing that it is a very effective form of therapy for helping with many psychological struggles. It can help reduce anxiety, depression, anger, guilt, low self-esteem, phobias, obsessive behaviour, panic attacks, traumatic stress disorder and many other conditions of emotional upset. More and more integrated healthcare systems are using CBT to help people deal with everyday struggles.

CBT stands for:

Cognitive – thinking

Behavioural – behaviour

Therapy – change

CBT is about how changing your thinking can help you to tackle and overcome any negative behaviours or habits that you may have, which are getting in the way of you leading a happy life. We all have the ability to wind ourselves up with our thinking, and sometimes you may get stuck in ‘thinking loops’ that are unhelpful – letting the same cycle of negative thoughts go round and round in your head.

But we don’t need to be slaves to this. If you realize that you are stuck in problematic thinking loops that are upsetting you or making your life more difficult, it is possible to stop and work them out. There are practical techniques you can learn in order to make conscious choices to change that thinking. This book will help you recognize when life is getting tough for you and provide you with practical strategies to stop things escalating and getting out of control.

The title of this book is and so it will concentrate in particular on showing how CBT can help you reduce the time you spend worrying about work and work-related circumstances. Many of us work in hectic, high-pressure environments, and find that the changing demands of our job are a frequent source of hassle and stress. Of course it is natural to have a healthy concern about your work performance, job prospects and career, but it is not in your best interests to worry yourself so much that you make yourself ill. It is important to find a balance between having a healthy commitment to your work and suffering from overriding anxiety as a result of being over-invested in it.

CBT also looks at resilience. We can all expect to go through some difficult patches in life – it’s unavoidable. Although CBT can help you to change negative thinking into more positive thinking, it does stress that sometimes we need to go through discomfort zones in order to progress in life. CBT can help increase your ability to tolerate the tough times without freezing with fear or crumpling under the pressures. As Winston Churchill famously said: ‘When you are going through hell, keep going.’

CBT can be used with emotional struggles of differing intensities, but in all cases the same basic techniques apply. Depending on the level of distress, CBT in conjunction with medicine may be recommended by doctors. This combination has been found to be highly effective for treating anxiety and depression. This book is certainly not intended to take the place of proper medical attention, and if you become truly worried about your ability to cope with a situation you should visit your doctor immediately. However, if you have some knowledge and understanding of CBT you will find that in many situations you are able to help yourself. CBT has been widely researched and tested, many scientific papers have been published and it is the preferred choice of many health organizations worldwide. It is an effective tool for dealing with the pressures of a modern working environment and if you learn to use it you will not only be happier but also, as a result of not being dogged by constant worries, a more effective employee.

This book will include:

• Where CBT came from
• How to recognize if you are getting stressed
• Your CBT ‘Think Kit’, a practical toolkit to teach you the basic ABC of CBT
• You and your Work
• Common problems in the workplace – anxiety, anger, guilt, depression, low self-esteem
• How to use your CBT ‘Think Kit’ for work
• Maximizing your happiness at work
• Balancing work and life
• Taking CBT further

Where did CBT come from?

There are many other types of therapy besides CBT that have evolved over the 20th century. As the study of psychology has become more popular many different methods for treating emotional difficulties have been put forward. This can sometimes be rather confusing. Before we start looking at the practical applications of CBT it is probably a good idea to explain how it was developed, in order to place it in context. What follows is a (necessarily very brief) history of therapy.

Freud (1856–1939) was a medical doctor, and one of the first scientists to become interested in studying human behaviour. He realized that some of his patients were showing signs of illness without an obvious physical cause and began to direct his attention to the study of the mind. He started to study human emotional development and concluded that some people may not develop in healthy ways, and that this could affect them for the rest of their lives. When people struggled, and perhaps exhibited ‘hysterical’, ‘repressed’ or ‘displacement’ behaviours, he thought it was a symptom of deeper unresolved problems. Freud recommended analysis of their childhood development to find where the blockages had occurred. This technique was called ‘psychoanalysis’. His theories and treatments had a huge impact on society at the time and have continued to greatly influence psychology as well as permeating many aspects of culture including art and literature.

Behaviour therapy developed when other psychologists in history wanted to learn more about the mechanisms of behaviour. A Russian psychologist called Pavlov (1849–1936) discovered that if he rang a bell when he gave food to a dog on enough occasions, eventually the dog would salivate in anticipation of getting food when it heard the bell, even if no food accompanied it. He called this a ‘conditioned reflex’. This knowledge has since been used in all sorts of situations to reinforce behaviours in humans too. If humans are rewarded with praise or ‘treats’ they are likely to repeat the behaviour they have been rewarded for. If we are rewarded with a bonus for being more productive at work, we are likely to want to repeat that behaviour. This is called positive reinforcement. On the flipside, it is theoretically also possible to use punishment in order to eliminate behaviour which is seen as unacceptable, though if we are applying that to the world of work it seems a rather scary management style!

In short, then, the aim of this kind of therapy is to change the behaviour of the subject (the clue is in the name!). It was then used for the treatment of people who suffered from ‘disorders’ of the mind, to train them to behave in more acceptable ways. An interesting point to note about treating people in this way is that although the treatment may often have changed their behaviour, it did not necessarily seem to get to the origin of their difficulties. That is to say, subjects treated with behaviour therapy do get into new habits of behaviour, but without really thinking about it.

Cognitive therapy was the next stage in considering human behaviour. In the 1940s there was a lot of interest in trying to understand the motivation people’s behaviours – something that was arguably lacking from behaviour therapy. It was noticed that although you could train people to behave differently, some continued to experience ‘disorders’ or to revert to previous problematic patterns of behaviour after a time.

Depression and anxiety were two areas of particular interest. A pioneer in this area was a psychoanalyst called Dr Aaron Beck, who noticed that his depressed patients seemed to think in similar ways. This included thinking negatively about themselves, the world in general and about their futures – they seemed to have got into the habit of thinking negatively. In the 1960s he started therapy programmes to help patients to identify their negative thoughts, to recognize that their thinking patterns had become ‘distorted’ from reality and to help them challenge these errors in their thinking.

While some attention was paid to the individual’s past, in order to see how they could have got into these negative thinking patterns, the main emphasis was on working in the present. The person’s thinking, or ‘beliefs’, about themselves, the world or their hopeless future could be challenged by working with their therapist. This could be the start of them breaking their cycles of repetitive, automatic, negative thinking and replacing them with more positive thinking. The more we think we are useless and avoid activities which we fear could confirm this negative view of ourselves, the more we seem to prove the validity of that view – we ensure that we ‘fail’ by never letting ourselves try. This causes us to perpetuate depression or escalate anxiety. We can get carried away with our negative thinking and ‘catastrophize’ what will happen in the future. By...