When we’re depressed we can experience a lot of guilt and regret.
Automatic Negative Thoughts
The first step towards reducing both the frequency of our automatic negative thoughts, and how detrimental they are, is to learn to recognize and record these automatic negative thoughts when they arise. This is part of what we do in the CBT Interrelationships worksheet from an earlier post. In addition to completing this worksheet, it’s good practice when learning CBT to just pay attention for and write down automatic negative thoughts whenever they come up.
The next step is to assess the accuracy of these ANTs. Then we can reframe our thoughts to look at things from different perspectives that don’t have such a negative impact on our moods. And as a result, we start feeling better. We’ll look at how we can do this in the next few posts. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them on the YouTube video page.