Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Can Be Life-Changing For Depression

Stay positive and keep yourself busy with pleasant activities to stay away from depression and other brain-related problem. Living with brain issues is challenging, but luckily there are some ways that can help to improve this condition. Cognitive behavioral therapy is a therapy that changes the way you think and act. It helps tackle mental health disorders. It seeks to persuade people that their current thoughts are too negative or distorted. It aims to change a person’s mood, feelings, outlook on life, and behavior.

Unlike psychotherapy, this therapy doesn’t spend much time addressing past events from your childhood. Rather, it focuses on addressing existing feelings and helping you react and respond differently.

Fairview Adult Day Care Center in Brooklyn NY offers cognitive behavioral therapy to adults and elderly people with traumatic brain injury or other neurological diseases. Let’s take a deeper dive into this therapy to better understand how it can help with depression.

Elderly woman solving puzzles as a part of cognitive behavioral therapy

What Does Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Involve?

While cognitive therapy focuses on your moods and thoughts, behavioral therapy focuses on actions and behaviors. Cognitive behavioral therapy brings these two strands together, with strong emotional support, to help alleviate depression.

Cognitive therapy for depression is a short-term approach that involves trust, compassion, and positive thinking. By reducing stress, and alleviating distress, it aims to help people think more positively about themselves and others.

Trained therapists map out a structured program designed to identify specific negative thought patterns. They then seek to modify behavioral responses to challenging or stressful situations that might increase feelings of hopelessness or depression.

Cognitive behavioral therapy involves breaking down your reactions and analyzing self-defeating thoughts. These may include seeing everything in absolute, black-and-white terms, or dismissing positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count”.

Depression often involves dwelling on the negative and it is not healthy to focus just on this aspect to the exclusion of everything else. Cognitive behavioral therapy counteracts this and tries to stop people magnifying or minimizing the importance of an event. It’s about persuading an individual that jotting your thoughts down can help you move away from depressive thinking.  

What is the main goal of this therapy?

The chief aim of therapy is to teach you how to deal with depression in a safe and constructive manner. It nudges you to develop more balanced and constructive ways to respond to stressors. The idea is that people suffering from depression, for instance, can see the world with new eyes and feel better.

To achieve this goal, therapists use various techniques, such as writing thoughts down on paper and analyzing them. This can help individuals replace negative thought patterns or perceptions with more constructive ones. Learning to assess external situations, your reactions or emotional behavior in a more comprehensive way can help people manage depression.

We at Fairview Adult Day Care Center in Brooklyn NY help individuals facing depression, anxiety or other mental health disorders embark on a positive journey of self-discovery. Contact us if you would like to talk to us about our medical and rehabilitation therapy services. We are here to help and answer any questions you may have.

This article is for educational and informational purpose only and does not substitute for professional medical advice. For any questions about your own health condition, speak to a qualified physician or healthcare provider.