Friday, September 19, 2014

Mindfullness Based Cognitive therapy

Depression affects a lot of people. They need not despair as there are lots of treatments out there which if given a chance will help them get through the ' black dog ' period. Black dog was the term used by Sir Winston Churchill to describe his depression and he often joked that the black dog had got him today.
Mindfullness or being aware or just being is the focusing of your mind on the here and now. Depression tends to warp your sense of time and you tend to focus more on the past turmoils or the uncertainty of the future. A simple way of being mindful is to take deep breaths and during inspirations counting from 0 to 10. Doing this about 8 minutes a day can help. Or you can just say, 'Ssssh!' and block out the riff raff of the thoughts that clutter yr mind.
Metacognitive therapy concentrates on the thought process per se and not on the thoughts. How you arrive at a thought ie the awareness of your thought process is supposed to makes a difference. In this school of thought, no judgements are made as regards the quality of yr thoughts.
On the other hand traditional cognitive therapy for treating depression deals more with the negative thoughts and judgements that you make and tries to change them or challenge them. You sort of talk back to your mind challenging your negative thoughts. Classically, a cognitive therapist would ask you about what is bothering you so as to bring your thoughts out for discussion. The next step is to find out how you feel having those thoughts. They try to break the thoughts down to identify the basic underlying disturbing thought and then dealing with correcting that.

A nice talk on Mindfullness based cognitive therapy is:

http://youtu.be/5eQ3MWz4yrI

No comments:

Post a Comment