What Is the CBT Journal and How Can It Improve Your Mental Health? — Sarah D Rees
What Is the CBT Journal?
The CBT Journal combines two of the most effective psychological tools we have, so you can take control, enhance your mindset, and improve your mental health.
It’s a digital download designed to be used as a four-week project to help you understand your mind. Alternatively, it can form part of an ongoing daily wellbeing routine.
The Journal is divided into two sections. First, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of the principles of CBT and learn how to apply them to your journaling practice. Structured journaling sheets bring your awareness to the thoughts, feelings and behaviours that shape your daily life. There’s also space for daily gratitude to provide balance and build emotional resilience.
Additional worksheets are provided to help you alter unhelpful thinking patterns, process emotions and change behaviours.
Why Should You Make Mental Health a Priority?
Your mind is one of your most precious assets. Within it, you experience every moment of life. Good mental health is closely linked to physical wellbeing and it’s also fundamental to feeling happy and content.
Our minds are busy, and our lives are demanding. Many of us struggle with stress and overwhelm. The brain is like a muscle. If you train the worried and anxious part every day, it becomes stronger and your ability to have a calm, settled mind becomes weaker.
But you can train your mind to behave in other ways- it just takes practice.
How Does Cognitive Behavioural Therapy Work?
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy or CBT is a form of psychotherapy that encourages you to become more aware of your individual patterns of thinking, feeling and doing. It also gives you the tools you need to change these patterns and improve your mental health.
When you start CBT, we begin by creating awareness of your mind. This awareness gives you more choice over how you think, feel and behave.
What’s Journaling Got to Do with It?
A regular journaling practise is a great way to process what happens to us each day and assess our patterns of thinking over time. It helps you become more aware of the thoughts you’re having, and it helps you engage with them from a curious standpoint rather than a place of overwhelm.
Just like talking, writing things down — getting them out of your head and down on paper — can be both freeing and healing. Venting in this way helps you make sense of things. Thoughts lose their power when we release them, so the intensity of difficult emotions is often reduced. Ultimately, writing helps us create clarity and become more objective about what’s going on inside our heads.
How Does It Do That?
Writing is a left-brain activity. This side of the brain likes thinking in words. It’s logical and analytical. Journaling fully engages the left-brain, freeing up the right-brain to deal with non-verbal cues, to intuit, and to tune into feelings. Both parts of the brain get to do what they’re best at, and they get to do it in tandem, allowing you to better understand what you’re thinking and feeling.
If you think something and don’t write it down, you’re only engaging the right-brain. The mere act of putting those thoughts down on paper means your left-brain is on-board too. The power of this whole-brain activity is that it taps into the subconscious mind, allowing you to see things differently and feel more confident about the steps you need to take to achieve the change you want in your life.
Is The CBT Journal for You?
Do you look at your life and see things that should make you happy, yet find yourself feeling sad and discontent? Is your mind always in overdrive? Do you feel out of control and anxious? Are you constantly trying to fix things but getting nowhere?
A few years ago, adding a regular journaling practice to my self-care routine helped me work through similar feelings. Because of this, I went on to create the CBT Journal. It’s designed to help anyone who’s keen to understand their mind more. Maybe you’re currently experiencing mental health problems or have struggled in the past. Perhaps you’re simply curious about your current patterns of thinking, feeling, and doing.
Buy The CBT Journal Now
Investing just 20 minutes a day will significantly impact your life, making you feel more content, fulfilled and happy, both in yourself and for everyone around you. You can find out more and purchase the CBT Journal here: The CBT Journal
Originally published at https://sarahdrees.co.uk on May 13, 2019.
