Mind Your Mood

Cognitive therapy has gained massive acceptance among mental health professionals as well as the public. As a matter of fact, cognitive therapy has become one of the most practiced and researched forms of psychotherapy in the entire universe. There are a number of reasons that explain this growing interest. One of them stems from the fact that cognitive therapy consists of basic down-to-earth ideas that are intuitive and appealing. Secondly, research studies have confirmed cognitive therapy to be very critical for individuals suffering from anxiety, and depression among other problems. Thirdly, lots of self-help books have aroused a strong and popular demand for cognitive therapy not only in the United States but also the entire world. Cognition refers to a perception or thought. In other words, cognitions describe the way you think about events or things at any particular moment. The thoughts go through your mind automatically without much control from your end. This has a huge impact on how you generally feel. For instance, people read self-help books on various subjects because of their thoughts and feelings. If they feel depressed and discouraged, they may pick an inspirational book to lift their moods. Your feelings are a sum total of the messages you give yourself. If you think of yourself as a loser or a useless person, those thoughts will compound to form a feeling which is mapped onto your behavioral pattern. Close to 2000 years ago, Epictetus, a Greek philosopher stated that people are oftentimes disturbed not by things but rather by the views we take of them. In the Bible, the book of Proverbs 23:7 states that "For as he thinks within himself, so he is." Shakespeare in Hamlet, Act 2, and Scene 2 expresses a similar idea and says "For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" The idea of how thinking commands your mood has been around for quite some time but many depressed people do not really understand it. When you are depressed, you may falsely think that the bad things that have happened to you are the cause of it. You may feel inferior and destined to be unhappy because someone you love rejected you or you failed in your work. Even though no single treatment will ever be an ultimate solution, cognitive therapy has been shown by research studies to be effective in dealing with a number of disorders including depression. This book explores the mind and how changing your moods can change your life.