Anxiety Disorders and CBT

Anxiety Disorders and CBT

We need information repeated on a regular basis to memorize something solidly. It's the intimate hallmark of how we learn. It may even shed some insight on certain mental disorders commonly experienced such as anxiety disorders.

Phobias afflict many people. We believe that people who suffer from anxiety disorders such as phobias are victims of an overacting fire-together/wire-together tendency in their brains.

In the middle of the last century, Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis developed a type of psychotherapy that uses this fire-together/wire-together tendency as a weapon against anxiety disorders. It's called cognitive behavior therapy (CBT). The assumption behind CBT is that what you think governs what you feel.

For example, if you have a phobia of dogs, you have negative automatic thoughts about dogs (that's the thinking part), so when you see one, anxiety is generated (that's the feeling part), To have those anxious feelings go away, you first have to attack their source: your negative thinking. CBT calls this faulty thinking.

The therapy teaches you to entertain other not-so-self-defeating ways of looking at dogs. CBT does not ask you to block out the fearful feelings. You couldn't; they're wired. It does challenge you to start thinking consistently of alternative choices of viewing a tough aversive subject. You need to make it a habit.

If you successfully challenge faulty thinking on a regular basis, the faulty thinking eventually goes away. Research shows that applied consistently, the anxiety also goes away – and of its own accord,

When done consistently in the hands of a trained therapist, CBT is a potent weapon. Research shows that it's amongst the most effective therapies for anxiety disorders that exist. It's also helpful for depression and bipolar disorder, and even certain types of schizophrenia are responsive.

(From Your Best Brain, Course Guidebook, by Professor John J. Medina).

Genetics play a large role in determining intelligence, and both nature and nurture influence complex human behavior. We have yet to untangle the relative contributions of each to intelligence.