3 Cognitive Techniques for Stress Management

Professionals use cognitive methods to help people alleviate stress as well as dealing with mental health problems like anxiety and depression. The use of cognitive behavioral therapy is popular among therapists because it can reduce the impact of stress that should affect the behavior and emotion of people. Thus, it is important to understand this concept in order to help people combat negative thinking and to reduce stress successfully.

1. Recognizing Negative Thoughts

It is the job of cognitive behavioral therapists to help an individual to recognize negative and irrational thinking. Thus, the client will be instructed to stop at least 5 times a day and then write down the thoughts in his or her mind. Part of this recognition is to ask how the person is feeling during those moments. This will be used by the therapist to analyze the patterns of the client’s behavior.

The therapist will then be able to review the notes together with the client so that he or she can help recognize the negative thoughts. This is important because these thoughts can be used as a basis in reducing stress.

Change the Thoughts

The therapist will also help the client to change these thoughts after it has been recognized during the session. A certain study also found out that those who have thoughts about stress to be a challenge and at the same time an opportunity have a chance to quickly recover than those who have thought of it as overpowering. So, if you think that you have no hope of changing stressful conditions being encountered, then there is lesser chance of getting well.

Thoughts can be changed with the help by therapists as they have the skills to teach clients in reframing negative thoughts. So if a client refuses to do things he or she hasn’t done before, the therapist will tell the client that it could be a chance for someone to learn something new.

3. Skills in Problem-Solving

Clients receive assistance from cognitive-behavioral therapists by teaching them how to tackle situations in ways that are healthy. Thus, the client will be requested to practice some stress-reducing and problem-solving techniques. It will be the job of the therapist to teach his or her client on how to make lists of steps in solving huge problems instead of being overwhelmed by negative thoughts.

Those who experienced stressful conditions due to large projects at work are likely to be asked to list the things that they need to do in order to get the project done. They will then be required to start completing the small tasks a step at a time.

It is important to keep in mind that giving yourself a break every now and then should be key in the treatment of stress. Sometimes, you also need to do things that should free your mind with negative thoughts. This will be helpful in the effort of confronting and dealing directly with stress so that it can be reduced if not totally eliminated.