It’s time for more about mental health and music. Previously, we learned about monotasking for focus and working on goals, then Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) as a macro-concept for meta-cognition and using Intentional, Nonjudgmental Self-Awareness to cultivate purpose, happiness, and success in existence. Remember: Motivation = Momentum, Folks, so keep practicing those skills daily. Even five minutes a day is enough to build lasting results.
Cognitive distortions and cognitive restructuring are the next logical skills to learn in CBT, and how to use those skills to work on goals without becoming overwhelmed. Both are core concepts from CBT that everyone who goes to formal psychotherapy should be educated about.
Let’s start with Cognitive Distortions (also known as Unhelpful/Automatic/Maladaptive thought patterns). Over my first two years of direct clinical practice, 99% of clients would respond: “I think I understand what that means,” and I’d say, “It basically means an unhelpful thought pattern.” To which they would respond, “Why didn’t you just say that?” So, I say that now. Yet, I still educate about the Beck Institute's formal language because if you want to go down that rabbit hole, those are their specific words.
Unhelpful Thought Patterns (UTPs) are exactly that - patterns of thought that all homo-sapiens are capable of which are unhelpful for accomplishing their goals, such as building happy relationships, achieving success in whatever endeavor they take on, resolving grief, cultivating a happy and positive mindset and more. UTPs suck. Big Time. And they suck in a very tricky way — that is because they are us. It is our prefrontal cortex and our use of it that is keeping the UTP in play. Yes, certainly, we may have adopted/learned it waaay back in our history because some jerk was very jerky towards us (think: people that hurt me with condescension, betrayal, manipulation, violence.) We may have even cultivated the UTPs ourselves. No matter how they got in place, as we begin to work to slow that roll and stop them from ruining our goals and mood, know this going into it — meta-cognition is always in play because those UTPs? They are a part of you.
Here’s a trick I’ve had success with — think of your prefrontal cortex as if it were an alien spaceship. It is ultra-advanced, and you have not had much formal training in how to use it to zip around the universe. As you learn and use CBT, you’re starting to directly engage with learning how to work the alien controls. UTPs are just one of the many blinking, flashing and beeping lights on the dashboard. Turning the UTP function to the “off” position is half the work. The other half of the work is turning on Helpful Thought Patterns (HTPs).
This takes time and work, so, again, Motivation = Momentum. In formal Beck-ian CBT language, HTPs are called Cognitive Restructuring. You are taking the “structures” of your UTPs and changing them to be Helpful thoughts.
UTPs come in a few shapes/sizes. They are most often these: All or Nothing, Catastrophizing, Fortunetelling, Disqualifying the Positive, Emotional Reasoning, Labeling/Mislabeling, Magnification/Minimization, Mind-reading, Overgeneralization, Personalization and Should Statements. You can read the details of how to more distinctly identify them here using this Beck Institute worksheet.
Start identifying which UTPs you struggle with. Then, learn and use the HTPs to challenge the UTPs in real-time, living your day-to-day, where they will pop up in response to stressors. Here are the HTPs to do cognitive restructuring with – Seeing Shades of Grey, Balance, Binocular, Evidence, Awareness and Rational. Think of UTPS like a nail that you either need to pound down or grind away. Either way, HTPs are the hammer/grinder tools to get the job accomplished.
Alright, that’s enough homework. Breathe, New Times Friend. Here’s some music to energize the journey. For Cognitive Restructuring, I like musicians and tunes that challenge expectations, that create unique soundscapes with hyper-unique lyrical content and ‘angular’ music that defies conventional status-quo constructs such as 4/4 time, verse/chorus/bridge and trying to get it all done in less than 4 minutes.
Next time, we'll dig into emotional intelligence and emotional hygiene, but for now, here are some suggestions from this month:
