How is cognitive therapy different from simply telling people to cheer up?
In: Other
Imagine you’ve been bowling most of your life and for the most part you’ve been able to bowl pretty accurately but over time you’ve developed this habit where it always seems to veer to the left and it’s been getting worse.
I can tell you to just stop doing that, but at this point it’s not something you can just stop doing. You’ve slowly been developing this bad habit that it just happens without you thinking. It’s become ‘muscle memory’, just a natural inclination you have.
So instead we need to look at your technique and come up with an exercise that over time gets rid of that bad habit and you reach a point where you no longer have to think about correcting it, it just no longer happens.
The brain works in a similar way. You can pick up bad habits over time and you can’t just simply say ‘stop doing that’, you have to do exercises that help correct those bad habits.
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