Mark Corson

By F. Domenik. Bard College.

Worksheet 4-13 Jasmine’s Thought Tracker Feelings and Sensations (Rated 1–100) Corresponding Events Thoughts/Interpretations Panic (95); terrified best aciphex 10mg, sweaty purchase 10mg aciphex fast delivery, I slammed my At first I thought I might rapid shallow breathing buy generic aciphex 20 mg on-line, dizzy car into a pole. All three of them look at this event in unique ways, and they feel differently as a result. Because of the way she interprets the event, Molly’s at risk for anxiety and depression. On the other hand, Jasmine panics about the bash into the pole; her reaction is the product of her frequent struggles with anxiety and panic. Part I: Analyzing Angst and Preparing a Plan 52 Sometimes people say they really don’t know what’s going on in their heads when they feel distressed. They know how they feel and they know what happened, but they simply have no idea what they’re thinking. If so, ask yourself the ques- tions in Worksheet 4-14 about an event that accompanied your difficult feelings. Chapter 4: Minding Your Moods 53 The Thought Tracker demonstrates how the way you think about occurrences influences the way you feel. Sad feelings inevitably accompany thoughts about loss, low self-worth, or rejection. Anxious or worried feelings go along with thoughts about danger, vulnerability, or horrible outcomes. Pay attention to your body’s signals and write them down whenever you feel some- thing unpleasant. Refer to the Daily Unpleasant Emotions Checklist earlier in this chapter for help. Rate your feeling on a scale of intensity from 1 (almost undetectable) to 100 (maximal). Ask yourself what was going on when you started noticing your emotions and body’s signals. The corresponding event can be something happening in your world, but an event can also come in the form of a thought or image that runs through your mind. Be concrete and specific; don’t write something overly general such as “I hate my job. Refer to the preceding Thought Query Quiz if you experience any difficulty figuring out your thoughts about the event. Worksheet 4-15 My Thought Tracker Feelings and Sensations (Rated 1–100) Corresponding Events Thoughts/Interpretations (continued) Part I: Analyzing Angst and Preparing a Plan 54 Worksheet 4-15 (continued) Feelings and Sensations (Rated 1–100) Corresponding Events Thoughts/Interpretations Visit www. We reveal how distortions in your thinking can make you more upset than you need to be, and we show you how to prosecute your distorted thoughts for the trouble they cause and rehabili- tate those thoughts into clear, beneficial thinking. Finally, we help you uncover the deep, core beliefs and assumptions that may be responsible for many of your distorted thoughts. These beliefs may act like cracked or dirty lenses that you see yourself and your world through, so we help you regrind those lenses for clear vision. Chapter 5 Untangling Twisted Thinking In This Chapter Discovering distortions in your thinking Prejudging yourself Assigning blame n this chapter, we cut to the chase and help you apply the principles of cognitive therapy, Iwhich is based on the premise that the way you interpret or think about events largely determines the way you feel. The great thing about cognitive therapy is that changing the way you think changes the way you feel. With the possible exception of our book editors, all human beings have some distorted thinking. Distorted means that your thinking doesn’t accurately reflect, predict, or describe what’s going on. Perhaps your mind filled with thoughts of dread and images of someone breaking into your house. For example, we have a dog we think is truly beautiful, but most of our friends and neighbors think he’s a peculiar-looking mutt. No doubt our perception is slightly flawed; it’s understandable because we love our dog, but it’s distorted nevertheless. The three types of reality scramblers are: The Information Reality Scramblers The Self-Judging Reality Scramblers The Self-Blame Reality Scramblers Although this chapter makes distinctions among various types of reality scramblers, in real- ity, scramblers often overlap or exist in groups. To put it another way, a single thought can involve several Information Reality Scramblers as well as scramblers involving self-judging and self-blame. The Information Reality Scramblers Information Reality Scramblers warp your perceptions of your world and events occurring around you; they distort how you think about what’s really happening. You may not know that Information Reality Scramblers affect your thinking, but if you give it a little thought, you’re likely to see that they do. For example, suppose a depressed man receives a mediocre per- formance review at work. He’s likely to enlarge this event and turn it into a complete catastrophe by assuming that he’s totally worthless as a person. Without the scrambler, the reality is simply that his perform- ance was considered average even though he would have preferred a better rating. This exercise shows you all the various ways that Information Reality Scramblers can affect your thinking and ultimately the way you feel. Read the description of each type of Information Reality Scrambler and the accom- panying examples in Worksheet 5-1. Think about when your thoughts might have been influenced by the Information Reality Scrambler. Reflect and write down any examples of specific thoughts that you’ve had which might be distorted by an Information Reality Scrambler. If you can’t think of an example for each type of Information Reality Scrambler, that’s okay. We give you more exercises for seeing how they do their work later in this chapter. Enlarging and shrinking: Your mind magnifies the awfulness of unpleasant events and minimizes the value and importance of anything positive about yourself, your world, or your future.

Therefore buy aciphex 20mg with visa, if an individual attributed their illness externally and felt that they personally were not responsible for it cheap 10mg aciphex fast delivery, they were more likely to choose the insulin pump and were more likely to hand over responsibility to the doctors generic 10 mg aciphex otc. A further study by King (1982) examined the relationship between attributions for an illness and attendance at a screening clinic for hypertension. The results demon- strated that if the hypertension was seen as external but controllable by the individual then they were more likely to attend the screening clinic (‘I am not responsible for my hypertension but I can control it’). Health locus of control The internal versus external dimension of attribution theory has been specifically applied to health in terms of the concept of a health locus of control. Individuals differ as to whether they tend to regard events as controllable by them (an internal locus of control) or uncontrollable by them (an external locus of control). Wallston and Wallston (1982) developed a measure of the health locus of control which evaluates whether an individual regards their health as controllable by them (e. For example, if a doctor encourages an individual who is generally external to change their life- style, the individual is unlikely to comply if they do not deem themselves responsible for their health. Although, the concept of a health locus of control is intuitively interesting, there are several problems with it: s Is health locus of control a state or a trait? Unrealistic optimism Weinstein (1983, 1984) suggested that one of the reasons why people continue to practise unhealthy behaviours is due to inaccurate perceptions of risk and susceptibility – their unrealistic optimism. He asked subjects to examine a list of health problems and to state ‘compared to other people of your age and sex, what are your chances of getting [the problem] greater than, about the same, or less than theirs? Weinstein called this phenomenon unrealistic optimism as he argued that not everyone can be less likely to contract an illness. Weinstein (1987) described four cognitive factors that contribute to unrealistic optimism: (1) lack of personal experience with the problem; (2) the belief that the problem is preventable by individual action; (3) the belief that if the problem has not yet appeared, it will not appear in the future; and (4) the belief that the problem is infrequent. In an attempt to explain why individuals’ assessment of their risk may go wrong, and why people are unrealistically optimistic, Weinstein (1983) argued that individuals show selective focus. He claimed that individuals ignore their own risk-increasing behaviour (‘I may not always practise safe sex but that’s not important’) and focus primarily on their risk-reducing behaviour (‘but at least I don’t inject drugs’). He also argues that this selectivity is compounded by egocentrism; individuals tend to ignore others’ risk-decreasing behaviour (‘my friends all practise safe sex but that’s irrelevant’). Therefore, an individual may be unrealistically optimistic if they focus on the times they use condoms when assessing their own risk and ignore the times they do not and, in addition, focus on the times that others around them do not practise safe sex and ignore the times that they do. In one study, subjects were required to focus on either their risk-increasing (‘unsafe sex’) or their risk-decreasing behaviour (‘safe sex’). Subjects were allocated to either the risk-increasing or risk-decreasing condition. Subjects in the risk-decreasing condition were asked questions such as ‘since being sexually active how often have you tried to select your partners carefully? The results showed that focusing on risk- decreasing factors increased optimism by increasing perceptions of others’ risk. There- fore, by encouraging the subjects to focus on their own healthy behaviour (‘I select my partners carefully’), they felt more unrealistically optimistic and rated themselves as less at risk compared with those who they perceived as being more at risk. The stages of change model The transtheoretical model of behaviour change was originally developed by Prochaska and DiClemente (1982) as a synthesis of 18 therapies describing the processes involved in eliciting and maintaining change. Prochaska and DiClemente examined these different therapeutic approaches for common processes and suggested a new model of behaviour change based on the following stages: 1 Precontemplation: not intending to make any changes. These stages, however, do not always occur in a linear fashion (simply moving from 1 to 5) but the theory describes behaviour change as dynamic and not ‘all or nothing’. For example, an individual may move to the preparation stage and then back to the contemplation stage several times before progressing to the action stage. Furthermore, even when an individual has reached the maintenance stage, they may slip back to the contemplation stage over time. The model also examines how the individual weighs up the costs and benefits of a particular behaviour. In particular, its authors argue that individuals at different stages of change will differentially focus on either the costs of a behaviour (e. For example, a smoker at the action (I have stopped smoking) and the maintenance (for four months) stages tend to focus on the favourable and positive feature of their behaviour (I feel healthier because I have stopped smoking), whereas smokers in the precontemplation stage tend to focus on the negative features of the behaviour (it will make me anxious). The stages of change model has been applied to several health-related behaviours, such as smoking, alcohol use, exercise and screening behaviour (e. If applied to smoking cessation, the model would suggest the following set of beliefs and behaviours at the different stages: 1 Precontemplation: ‘I am happy being a smoker and intend to continue smoking’. This individual, however, may well move back at times to believing that they will con- tinue to smoke and may relapse (called the revolving door schema). The stages of change model is increasingly used both in research and as a basis to develop interventions that are tailored to the particular stage of the specific person concerned. For example, a smoker who has been identified as being at the preparation stage would receive a different intervention to one who was at the contemplation stage. However, the model has recently been criticized for the following reasons (Weinstein et al. Researchers describe the difference between linear patterns between stages which are not consistent with a stage model and discontinuity patterns which are consistent. Such designs do not allow conclusions to be drawn about the role of different causal factors at the different stages (i. Experi- mental and longitudinal studies are needed for any conclusions about causality to be valid. These different aspects of health beliefs have been integrated into structured models of health beliefs and behaviour. For simplicity, these models are often all called social cognition models as they regard cognitions as being shared by individuals within the same society. However, for the purpose of this chapter these models will be divided into cognition models and social cognition models in order to illustrate the varying extent to which the models specifically place cognitions within a social context.