The Little CBT Workbook [Paperback]

This book contains the essence of what is now the most successful model of psychological therapy in the world. It is written with clarity and while small enough to be both portable and accessible it has enough space to work the exercises provided. I would recommend it strongly to those who feel there s a problem that they can fix themselves if only they had the right tools. --Dr Michael Bristow, FRCPsych, Consultant Psychiatrist, Priory Group

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy made practical.

The Little CBT Workbook is a portable workbook introducing essential CBT techniques you can use to improve your wellbeing today. Filled with exercises, checklists and learning points, The Little CBT Workbook enables you to explore key CBT principles and discover how to apply them to your day-to-day life.

As an interactive introduction to CBT, The Little CBT Workbook is easy to understand and gives a complete overview of CBT, suitable for self-teaching or to supplement a course of counselling – or to provide a head start for those on CBT waiting lists.

Authored by practising CBT specialists whose expertise is regularly cited in media from City AM and Management Today to The Times and Daily Mail, The Little CBT Workbook helps you identify how you think about yourself, the world and other people, as well as understand how what you do affects your thoughts and feelings.

Learn how to:
Spot negative thinking
Chart your emotions
Set wellbeing goals
Combat anxiety and stress
Remove roadblocks to progress
Establish new core beliefs

Through step-by-step CBT exercises, goal-oriented summaries and action points, you can  refocus your awareness and overcome fear, depression, anger, insomnia, stuttering and other issues which have been generating negative emotions and hindering your positive outlook on life. Understand how your thoughts may be affecting you and, crucially, learn how to change your mood and improve your ability to cope with feared or uncomfortable situations.

The Little CBT Workbook enables you to become more familiar with the benefits of CBT, but also ensures you have the insight, tools and confidence to apply it to your own situation and put into practice ‘wellness’ behaviours today.

The practical way to improve your life, fast!

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is an established psychological technique that can help you dramatically transform your life, both professionally and personally. Packed with thought-provoking exercises and easy-to-apply advice, this practical, hands-on guide to understanding and using CBT helps you:

• Overcome problems like stress and anxiety
• Re-programme negative thoughts
• Focus on postive behaviours to feel good about yourself

Written by experienced CBT practioners and registered psychologists, The Little CBT Workbook is the only guide you'll need to turn your life around.

Dr Michael Sinclair and Dr Belinda Hollingsworth are both practising psychologists at City Psychology Group in Harley Street and Canary Wharf. Director Dr Sinclair is also regularly cited as a CBT expert in the media.

2. Understanding yourself with CBT

There is no doubt that there are many day-to-day stressful situations that we encounter, and unfortunately at times we experience other more significant traumatic events. In psychology, we believe that these environmental stressors, albeit very challenging to deal with, actually only serve as the triggers to our distress, and are not the root cause of it.

When we feel stressed, it makes sense that we assume something has stressed us out. We start to look for the cause of that stress: who or what did that to me? We start to assume that our job, relationships, finances or other life situations have caused our stress. However, in doing this we are actually looking too far afield, as the cause of our stress is actually a lot closer than we think!

Difficult situations trigger off our own unique internal response, including thoughts, behaviours and emotions. It is actually the interaction between these that maintains and increases our stressful experience and not the situations around us, as we tend to assume.

Our internal stress response

Psychologists have found there are four ‘separate’ parts of ourselves in which we have four different types of corresponding reactions or experiences. We experience emotions in our ‘emotional-self’, thoughts in our ‘thinking-self’, behaviours in our ‘behavioural-self’ and physical sensations in our ‘physical-self’. It is important to recognise that we don’t actually feel emotions in our thinking-self, nor do we have thoughts in our emotional-self and so on. These four separate parts do, however, interact with one another to create our whole psychological experience at any given time.

Let’s take a closer look at this interaction now.

Say you were rushing to leave the house whilst running late to catch your train into work in the morning. You might think to yourself (thinking-self),

‘I’m so late now, I’m never going to catch that train’, which may make you feel anxious (emotional-self). This may lead you to start breathing faster and your heart might start racing (physical-self). You may then decide to sit down to compose yourself (behavioural-self). You may then start to think further (thinking-self) ‘What am I doing? I’m definitely going to miss that train now and be late for my meeting with the boss!’ This thought may then lead you to feel even more anxious which may lead to faster breathing and so on. The illustration of the CBT model over the page highlights the interaction between the four parts of us, in all directions.