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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
Nip workplace stress in the bud with CBT
Packed with useful tips that make it easy to incorporate CBT—Cognitive Behavioral Therapy— into your working day, CBT at Work For Dummies helps you reap the benefits of a more focused working life. You'll discover how integrating CBT at work promotes improved productivity and concentration, lower staff turnover, enhanced employer/employee and client relationships, reduced cost of staff absenteeism caused by illness, injury, stress, and more.
An alarming number of individuals in the UK and across the globe suffer from work-related stress, some to the point of experiencing illness. The good news is, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy—often associated with treating acute mental health conditions—is finding its way into the workplace, where it's being used as a way to combat one of the most common occupational health issues: stress. In this friendly and accessible guide, you'll find everything you need to put CBT into practice today, whether you're in charge of managing employee wellness or just want to find a positive and productive way to get through the workday yourself.
- Answers the call of business leaders seeking creative solutions to enhance productivity and minimize the effects of stress in the workplace
- Offers employees trusted ways to be more effective in the workplace while reducing personal stress levels
- Arms learning and development professionals with the know-how to apply mindfulness meditation in the workplace
- Details the benefits of making CBT a part of your business plan
If you're an employer looking to get the best out of your staff or an employee interested in reducing stress and anxiety whilst achieving an enhanced performance at work, CBT at Work For Dummies can help.
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Seitenzahl: 571
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
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CBT at Work For Dummies®
Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, www.wiley.com
This edition first published 2016
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CBT at Work For Dummies®
Visit www.dummies.com/cheatsheets/cbtatwork to view this book's cheat sheet.
Table of Contents
Cover
Introduction
About This Book
How to Use This Book
Foolish Assumptions
Icons Used in This Book
Beyond the Book
Where to Go from Here
Part I: Getting Started with CBT at Work
Chapter 1: Reducing Your Anxieties at Work with CBT
Coping with Changing Roles at Work
Thinking Rationally to Troubleshoot Your Emotions
Recognising Problems in the Workplace
Discovering the Benefits of the CBT Problem-Solving Method
Chapter 2: Discovering How CBT Works
Understanding Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
Meeting the ABCs of CBT
Tackling Your Unsettling Feelings
Chapter 3: Using CBT to Change Unhelpful Thinking
Observing Your Behaviour at Work
Building Yourself a CBT Toolkit
Choosing to Use Your CBT Toolkit
Chapter 4: Working in Healthy Ways
Discovering Your Environment at Work
Changing Your Attitudes in the Workplace
Using CBT to Adjust Your Workplace Emotions
Part II: Benefits, Bonuses and Added Value for All
Chapter 5: Looking after Yourself at Work
Allowing Yourself to Be Number One
Taking Responsibility for Yourself
Being Your Own Best Friend
Investing in Your Overall Health
Chapter 6: Impressing Employers with Your Professional Integrity
Ensuring Your Firm Hires a Responsible Person – You!
Taking Responsibility for Yourself as a Dynamic Employee
Benefitting the Organisation
Chapter 7: Putting CBT to Work … at Work!
Identifying Problem Areas at Work
Targeting Unsettling Emotions
Implementing CBT Techniques for Work-Related Problems
Part III: Working with CBT (Work and You)
Chapter 8: Feeling Positive about Your Work
‘Keeping It on the Sunny Side!’ Working at Optimistic Thinking
Increasing Favourable Interactions at Work
Putting Your Job into Perspective
Taking in the Wider View to Catch Important Opportunities
Optimising Your Chances of a Positive Work Climate
Chapter 9: Matching Your Personality to Your Job
Considering the Personality Types
Taking a Look at Your Own Personality
Linking Personality Types to Different Jobs
Adopting the Role of a Successful, Happy Worker
Chapter 10: Creating Your Own Philosophy for Work
Delving into Your Attitudes toward Work
Identifying Dissonances between Your Beliefs and Your Actions
Pinpointing Unhelpful Beliefs with CBT
Staying Put or Leaving Your Job
Chapter 11: Exploring Your Relationships at Work
Taking a Hard Look at Your Colleagues
Considering the Way You Come across at Work
Making Friends at Work
Part IV: Using CBT in Your Organisation
Chapter 12: Taking Action! Implementing CBT at Work
Gaining Insight into Yourself with CBT
Seeing the CBT Methods in Action
Reflecting on and Tackling Your Tricky Areas
Drawing up a CBT Plan of Action
Chapter 13: Seeing CBT as a Positive Force in the Workplace
Using CBT in Transition Management
Communicating a Consistent Message throughout Your Company
Facing up to Relationship Issues at Work
Chapter 14: Communicating the Benefits of CBT to Other People
Testifying to CBT by Your Example
Advocating the Use of CBT at Work
Using Your CBT Experience to Help Other People’s Struggles
Chapter 15: Introducing CBT Methods to Your Organisation
Including CBT in Your Workplace
Seeing How CBT Benefits Your Company’s Bottom Line
Leading CBT Workshops and Seminars
Looking at Basic Communication Skills
Part V: Next Steps and the Future
Chapter 16: Transferring Your CBT Practice to New Situations
Widening the Application of Your CBT Skills
Making Use of CBT Outside of Work
Creating an Overall Consistent Way of Being
Chapter 17: Adapting to the Inevitable Changes at Work
Accepting the Need to Be Flexible
Being Flexible at Work: Transitions, Redundancy and Retirement
Retaining a Sense of Who You Are
Chapter 18: Revising and Maximising Your Work Opportunities
Assessing Your Thinking about Pressure at Work
Mapping Your Work Options
Striking Out on Your Own: Self-Employment
Chapter 19: Exploring Additional Practices for Health and Wellbeing
Gaining a Perspective on Your Whole Being
Understanding that CBT is for Life, Not Just for Crises!
Part VI: The Part of Tens
Chapter 20: Ten Top Tips to Train You in CBT
Reminding Yourself of the CBT Basics, Again and Again
Revising the ABC Toolkit
Remembering One Example of CBT in Action
Using the ABCs: Considering Your Own Examples
Reflecting on the Last Week at Work
Recording Unsettling Work Events
Carrying out Your Own Self-Assessment on the Workweek
Applying the CBT Toolkit to Each New Event
Working with a CBT Buddy
Creating Your Own Version of the CBT Toolkit
Chapter 21: Ten Pointers to Maintain Your CBT Practice
Treating Yourself with Patience
Keeping an Emotions Diary
Researching and Evaluating CBT Apps
Choosing Your Method for Recording Your Emotional Life
Analysing Your Emotional Data
Assessing Your Work Performance
Identifying Areas You Want to Improve
Creating a Plan of Action
Implementing and Recording Your Goals
Making Sure that You Practise, Practise, Practise
Chapter 22: Ten Tips for Maximising Success in the Workplace
Developing Enlightened Self-Interest
Creating a Philosophy for Work
Being a Fallible Human Being
Keeping a Healthy Perspective
Laughing at Yourself
Exercising Your Mind and Body
Accepting Yourself
Empathising with Other People
Remembering that Life Isn’t a Rehearsal
Prioritising Your Life
Chapter 23: Ten Invaluable Ideas for CBT Resources
Reading Yourself toward Feeling Better
Getting Techy Help
Surfing for CBT Websites
Hearing All about CBT
Sitting Down with a CBT Movie
Thinking about Training Courses
Considering Talking to Friends and Family
Accessing National Directories
Staying Local
Employing Mind and Body Resources
About the Author
Cheat Sheet
Connect with Dummies
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Introduction
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, or CBT, is a type of practical helping strategy based upon years of research in the world of psychology. In the search for greater understanding of how you think and behave, CBT has developed into a popular helping tool. Since the early days of Freud and his ideas on the human mind and the many other theories and therapies that have followed, trying to get a clearer picture of the emotional roller coaster of life continues to be a popular topic. CBT seems to appeal to many people both in medical and personal settings. Personal development books rank very highly and continue to be popular. Is this because you are interested in trying to work out what is going on in your head? You may want to find out why you make the decisions you do about life, relationships, and in particular what is going on at work. You spend so much time during your working life dealing with people, issues, events, and interactions and at times you can find yourself struggling to get to grips with all of this. Is it any wonder that you may feel at times that you want to try to stand back and make some sense of it all?
CBT can help you identify what emotions are bubbling up inside you and teach you some practical strategies to help you reduce the negative ones that you could do without. You can apply CBT any time, in any situation that sends you into a spin, but in particular, this book uses examples in the work situation to help you pinpoint common examples of work life imbalances.
Whenever you are feeling worried or anxious about work, you could say it’s the warning light that you may want to do something about it to try to reduce the uneasy feelings. You are the only one who really knows how you are feeling. This book gives you an introduction to the ideas of CBT, and explains the practical strategies you can apply to reduce anxieties. There is some of the theory behind CBT included too, to help you put into perspective what makes it stand out from other therapies. You may also want to work with your medical professionals, perhaps a psychotherapist as well at times, but this book will guide you to making choices which are in your best interest.
In all the working situations I have come across in the different jobs I have done, including manufacturing work, education, sales, global financial organisations, central government, prisons, leisure industry and cruise ship lecturing, I found similar problems and difficulties. I encountered problems and emotional upsets both in my own working life and as a psychotherapist working for an international employee assistance H.R. company. All the examples are based on real-life scenarios, across a wide range of employment situations.
I worked for a year in California on a job exchange and first encountered being helped by an Employee Assistance Programme whilst working there. I returned to the UK and decided I would like to train to be able to work as a Stress Manager and apply the U.S.A. experience to my work as a psychologist in the UK. That was in 1989. Our group was the first to train in a new type of cognitive therapy. Since then, I have used CBT in my work both personally and professionally. This book is the result of wanting to share what I have learnt with as many people as possible, who also find work a struggle sometimes. I know that CBT can be helpful. I have learned this from all the hundreds of clients I have worked with, seeing them work through the difficult times and from the feedback they give saying how useful the CBT has been. I wish CBT had been around when I was in the early years of my career; I would have spent far less time agonising over work problems and decisions, insecurities and sleepless nights. If only I could have applied some CBT to my irrational thinking and understood that worrying and making myself anxious and upset was not going to help. CBT does not suggest that you don’t care about life and work, and become some emotionless automaton. CBT helps you to work out your unhealthy negative thinking and change it to a healthy concern that makes a good night’s sleep more of a possibility and your work life and career a calmer and rewarding path.
Once you have learned some CBT, you will have that knowledge and a toolkit to apply whenever you start to feel uneasy.
CBT is for life, not just for crises.
About This Book
This book is for people who want to find ways to help themselves reduce emotional upsets at work, learn a practical therapy and be able to apply these coping strategies at work and at home. Although the examples are work-based, the suggestions and learning can be equally applied in your personal life. Whatever level of work you are involved in, self employed, team member, management, employer or managing director of an international global organisation, this book is for you. I have worked using CBT techniques with all levels of people in their place of work, written training courses for organisations and provided individual therapy for many who have come for work related issues. This book will also help you to plan for the future, manage your career, provide yourself with coaching to enhance your experiences at work and recognise what sort of work preferences you have and how that fits with your personality. This book covers the following:
The basic ideas of CBT, what the therapy does and how it works
How you can use the CBT techniques to apply to your problems at work
Common emotional upsets with examples from real life
Ways to identify your trouble spots and decide if you want to reduce the anxieties
How to look after yourself at work
Benefits for your workplace as well as yourself
How to deal with difficult people
CBT is not a quick fix but a helpful tool for life
All the way through the book, the new ideas presented are backed up by putting them in the context of a situation in the workplace. I have found that clients find the real-life examples give meaning to the CBT and help them to remember how to do it. Like any new skill you learn, you need to understand, learn, apply and go over it again when new situations arise. I didn’t learn to ski by just watching the instructor and trying it out once; I needed to go over and over the techniques, try them out, fall over, pick myself up and have a think about what didn’t quite work out. The more I was prepared to put myself through the discomfort zone of possibly falling over, and work through it, the more the possibility of a smooth ski run was likely. Skiing eventually became automatic, but there are still times when a wobble reminds me to stay focused and re-apply the techniques.
How to Use This Book
You can use this book to dip in and out of the chapters and subsections. Each chapter is stand alone, and as you scan the contents, you may find that you want to immediately just read the bit that applies to you at this moment. This is fine. The book is designed this way. It is helpful for the beginner and the more experienced who may already have an understanding of what CBT is about. If you decide you really want to have a look at the CBT method and try it out on yourself, then reading Chapter 2 will give you a good introduction to the basic ideas and methods. You do not need to remember all the bits you read in order to move on; you will find you remember the bits that are significant to you anyway. You are the seeker in your own journey of self understanding. You can find your own way and take responsibility for your learning and decide what is useful for you. CBT is exactly that, taking responsibility for your own emotional wellbeing.
There are many stories, anecdotes, case studies, references and descriptions of different types of psychological conditions which can occur. Some of these have their own section or are in grey tinted boxes, called sidebars. These help explain how people feel at times and you can choose which interests you or skip to the ones that are personally relevant. The first section of a self-help book I turned to when I first discovered a book on stress in the 1970s was ‘The Symptoms of Depression’. I mentally ticked off 90 per cent of these symptoms. This was the start of understanding that what I was feeling was an actual condition, not a failure on my part to cope.
This book could be a start for you to want to find out more on particular areas. Chapter 23 provides you with information for finding more help, books, downloads, websites, mental health resources, apps and technical help, training resources and opportunities to further your knowledge. There are other For Dummies books that expand on some of the topics mentioned in this book. For example, there is a whole book devoted to CBT, another on Mindfulness and a specialist Mindfulness at work.
Within this book, you may note that some web addresses break across two lines of text. If you’re reading a hardcopy of this book and want to visit one of these web pages, simply key in the web address exactly as it’s noted in the text, pretending as if the line break doesn’t exist. If you’re reading this as an e-book, you’ve got it easy – just click the web address to be taken directly to the web page.
Foolish Assumptions
In writing this book, I have made a few assumptions about who you are:
You are working or are looking for work.
You are looking for ideas and practical suggestions about how to cope with work.
You may have experienced anxieties, insecurity or just general unhappiness in your work life at times.
You want to maximise your opportunities and experiences at work as an investment for your future.
You want to progress your career using logical and well planned strategies.
You have an interest in personal development and in particular how you can apply that to work.
You are interested in finding out how you work and also why others at work behave the way they do.
You have heard people talk about CBT or have read somewhere it is a fairly new form of therapy that has its roots in scientific research and seems to have a high success rate.
You have a friend who has had some CBT treatment and raves about it.
Even though you are feeling pretty much okay about work and your personal life, you are interested in finding out about recent innovations in healthcare.
You are thinking of training to be a psychotherapist and want to look at CBT to compare it with other treatments and counselling.
This book addresses these issues and more besides. It is for anyone who wants to find out about CBT, mental health and work environments. While most employee referrals for CBT therapy are for people over the age of 18, the earlier you can have a greater understanding of yourself and others, the earlier you can start reducing the unsettling emotions in life.
Icons Used in This Book
There are some icons used in For Dummies books that appear down the side of the page. Here are explanations of the ones used in this book.
This icon encourages you to pay special attention to what’s being said.
This icon directs your attention to something to help make things clearer.
This suggests you pay particular attention to help avoid any pitfalls.
This icon suggests you mull something over in your mind to give consideration to the idea.
This icon tells you that the info beside it is a real-world example.
Beyond the Book
As well as the resources section at the back of the book, listing suggestions for further reading and access to other resources, I have included bonus online material.
There is a brief description of this treasure trove of free digital content and crucially where it’s hidden, just for you to discover.
Cheat sheet:
This is a bite size text that lets you know some of the key points contained in
CBT for Work For Dummies
but in an ultra condensed form. The cheat sheet is there to give you the basics. All Dummies books have a cheat sheet, and they enable readers to quickly refer to a fact without having to carry the book around or power up the e-reader. One cheat sheet lists ten tips for the application of CBT when things get tricky. Clients used to tell me that having the cheat sheet helped them focus on what they needed to do when they felt themselves getting upset emotionally. Another sheet contains things to look out for if you feel you might be getting depressed. Cheat sheets are fast, fun and full of useful information, and you can find them at
www.dummies.com/cheatsheets/cbtatwork
.
Dummies online articles:
There is extra information that I think you may find interesting but not contained in the book. One is a true case study of a burned-out employee who had a breakdown and got his life back on track after discovering CBT and applying it to himself. Another is about how people sometimes get the feeling that they are going to be found out that the are no good at their jobs, called “The Imposter Syndrome”, and how research has found these feelings are quite common. Another is about how using CBT in your organisation can make a big difference and how many companies are now looking to offer it within their organisations. A fourth online article looks more widely at how including CBT and other strategies can help you achieve a more balanced and happier you. There is so much interesting material to be looked at and add to your wealth of understanding of how you tick. All this extra content can be found at
http://www.dummies/extras/cbtatwork
.
Where to Go from Here
You may have gathered that I am a great advocate of CBT. I do think that even just a little knowledge about how it works and how you can apply it to yourself and become your own therapist for everyday emotional turbulence will help you steer a smoother course in your life. I have worked with thousands of clients and worked in many situations over the years, and CBT has been the most significant addition to all that work. You can choose how much or how little you want to learn. My aim is to share with you the knowledge and experiences I have built up in the hope that some of it will be practically useful to you. I hope you will take away the bits that are relevant to you and encourage others to find out about CBT, too. May you find your great journey of discovery interesting, helpful and even fun!
Part I
Getting Started with CBT at Work
Visit www.dummies.com/extras/cbtatwork for great Dummies content online.
In this part …
Learn to minimize stress and take control of your emotions at work.
Discover the components of CBT and see how you can connect your feelings to your thinking.
Change the way you think with the help of a CTB toolkit that you can make.
Identify with the struggles you encounter at work to help you make your workplace a healthier environment for you.
Chapter 1
Reducing Your Anxieties at Work with CBT
In This Chapter
Understanding the pressures of the modern workplace
Diagnosing your work-based emotional difficulties
Tooling up with CBT to survive at work
The modern workplace is often a diverse, fast-paced environment fraught with challenges and potential problems. Your role is to get through each day as best you can and achieve your targets and goals. Considering how much time you spend at work during your lifetime, you’d be unusual if sometimes you didn’t wrestle with anxieties, self-doubt, anger, guilt, confusion and a general feeling of unhappiness.
Fortunately, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) was developed to help you reduce these sorts of tensions and insecurities. In a sense, CBT guides you to become your own therapist, as you use its techniques to reflect on and tackle your troubling feelings. With CBT, you train yourself to recognise when things are getting tough and affecting your emotional wellbeing. You can then apply the CBT formula to work actively to reduce the intensity of the troubling emotions.
Think of CBT as helping you to be the world’s foremost expert on you! Your new internal voice disputes your irrational thinking, allowing you to decide whether you want to make changes in the way you view your job, other people and your employer in order to reduce your worries.
Here I introduce you to the basics of CBT and how it can help you at work. Throughout this chapter, I also provide an overview of the book as a whole, providing cross references to other chapters as appropriate.
Coping with Changing Roles at Work
The workspace is a constantly changing arena. People have always been concerned about finding ways to survive and coping with the diversification of jobs, whether they’re working on the land, in communities and villages or in specialised purpose-built offices.
You may yourself have held many different jobs, needing to adapt and retrain as necessary in order to make yourself eligible for different work roles. In fact, being flexible and having wide-ranging experiences and skills is often seen as an asset these days and not an indication that you can’t stick at a job.
The inspiration to write this book comes from my practical experience in working in many different jobs in various settings and recognising the common nature of the problems that people encounter at work.
For example, I’ve done manual work in a textile factory, taught young children in nurseries and primary schools and worked with emotionally challenged teenagers in the inner city. I’ve also studied to be a psychotherapist; worked in a ski-chalet in France, cooking and cleaning; managed lectures on a cruise ship; and written courses on change management for international financial organisations and national government.
The great thing about CBT strategies and skills is that you can apply them in all employment situations that people work in today, whether within local communities, in rural locations, towns or cities or in an international setting.
Stressing out at work
Workplace stress is a pretty familiar phrase in today’s marketplace and its negative effects on mental and physical health are well-documented. As a result, developing the skills and attitudes of mind to help you cope is a priority.
External forces, such as changing market economies affecting companies and resulting in redundancies, layoffs and closures, aren’t a reflection of your individual performance in a job but of factors outside your control.
Taking charge of your emotions
You can’t control many of the situations you encounter at work, including the bosses and managers you find yourself working under or the people in your team. But you can take control over how you’re affected by these factors. Chapter 11 talks more about CBT and work relationships.
Feeling helpless and lapsing into depression can be a response to feeling that you’re stuck in a difficult situation. You may start by experiencing feelings of anxiety, butterflies in the stomach and a dread of going into work, and fear progressing to panic. Such anxiety can result in you being more likely to make mistakes and may compound your worries. You can feel like you’re on a downward spiral of incompetence, and your self-esteem may plummet too.
The good news is that CBT can help you to train yourself to take charge of your negative emotions and do something about them before you fall into the pit of doom (your GPS won’t find it, but it’s there, just below the pothole of ruin and nestling behind the shaft of lost hope!). When you implement CBT, you become fully aware of your emotions. You’re encouraged to allow yourself to look at what’s happening and to use the CBT toolkit from Chapter 3 to work actively on dealing with your negative automatic thoughts (or NATs; see Chapter 8 for details), thus reducing the ‘disturbing’ emotions to less disruptive and manageable ones.
Thinking Rationally to Troubleshoot Your Emotions
Of all the counselling methods and therapies I trained in, CBT resonated most strongly with me. I was always a hurry hurry, rush rush type of personality, often working myself up into a state of anxiety and demonstrating low levels of tolerance for frustration. I usually achieved what I set out to do, but the road was fraught with anxiety, self-doubt and, at times, guilt.
Although I agreed with the ideas behind other forms of counselling, I felt that I didn’t have the time for weekly sessions and months of therapy. Fortunately, CBT is intended to be short-term therapy that you can apply to your whole life (see Chapters 16 and 19).
Here I lay out the basics of CBT, its practical nature and how the responsibility is on you to tackle your emotional problems and nobody else’s.
Meeting the CBT basics
CBT helps you to discover and prioritise your emotional problems, encouraging you to take responsibility for your emotional development (flip to Chapter 7 for more on these aspects). It uses examples of real-life problems to help you reinforce your learning and become accountable to yourself to work on the issues you identify as needing attention.
You can see CBT as comprising six areas:
Explaining the problems: Here are just a few examples of the long list of emotions and behaviours that may be causing you distress at work:
- Anger
- Anxiety
- Confidence/self-esteem issues
- Depression – withdrawal, feeling sad, loss of enjoyment
- Low frustration tolerance – impatient, angry
- Medicating yourself inappropriately
- Panic – feeling fearful
- Feelings and behaviours as a result of – illness, pain, and incapacity
- Struggles with relationship difficulties
- Unhelpful behaviours – eating, drinking, self harming
Identifying the emotions: You will then be encouraged to work out what emotions you are experiencing which are unsettling or distressing. (Check out
Chapter 2
for how to start spotting and naming your negative feelings).
Working out the origin of the reasons for these feelings: There will always be a reason for a 'trigger' which sets you off worrying or feeling anxious, or angry or any other negative emotion. It may not be obvious at first but spending time working out what it is that sets off these feelings is an important step (you may find
Chapter 3
helpful here).
Looking at your possible choices and options: You may think you are trapped and have no alternative paths to choose from. This in itself can set off negative thinking and feelings. There are always some choices, even if all of them are unattractive and hard to take. (
Chapter 4
talks more about having options and making choices, for good or ill).
Deciding whether you want to work on changing the way you think about what’s happening for you: Sometimes you may decide that you are just going to put up with the difficult situations and decide you don't want to change. This is fine, you don't have to do anything. Having a look at the consequences of doing nothing, though, can be useful, as in the long term you may be setting yourself up for an even tougher journey in the future. Taking some time to consider all of this helps you make more informed choices. (Try
Chapter 5
to think specifically about your problems in your workplace).
Learning and applying the CBT method of linking the feeling–thinking connection: If you decide you would like to work on reducing some of the negative feelings precipitated by your thinking, then you will need to learn the CBT methods to be able to apply them for yourself. Some people may choose to find a CBT therapist to teach them and others, like you, who is reading this book and is up for teaching yourself and ultimately helping you to be informed about CBT practice. (
Chapter 7
is the place to start for using CBT at work).
Choosing to use CBT therapy doesn’t involve secrets or magic (no incantations featuring knee of newt or toe of toad!). You just make a conscious decision to learn and apply CBT to your troubles and to take responsibility for your own emotional wellbeing.
In certain situations, you can find that your choices are tough ones to make and you certainly won’t like some of the options available at work. But CBT works with you to look at the possible emotional and behavioural consequences of choosing to do nothing and carrying on upsetting yourself.
Often you can choose to ignore what’s happening, because it seems too painful or scary to admit the reality of the situation, but CBT helps you to pay attention to it and do something about it.
Seeing your options laid out in front of you, along with the ‘logic’ behind your irrational thinking and the consequences of continuing to think in a certain way, can be very enlightening.
As the old saying has it: ‘procrastination is the thief of time’. How often have you put something off until it becomes so urgent and pressing that the consequences start pushing over into a crisis? But then, after you attend to the task, you find that it wasn’t so bad after all and you wish that you hadn’t spent so long in a state of anxiety.
Tackling tough times with CBT
A core belief in CBT is that you can’t make changes without pain, which is why some people call it a tough therapy. It involves goals, guidelines, exercises, homework and the constant need to be ‘on your own case’. There is no change without pain.
You have to go through the discomfort zones to progress. (I discuss the specific issue of workplace changes in Chapters 13 and 17).
If you want to keep avoiding your problems – living in denial between episodes of distress, surrounded by the crutches of chocolate and hot drinks, and yet aware subconsciously that troubling moments at work lie around the corner – CBT won’t work for you. The fact is that you have to make CBT work for you.
CBT guides you through the process, however, because you work out what your unpleasant zones may be in advance of pushing yourself through them. You make the conscious decision to take on the necessary work yourself, in terms of changing your attitudes, and use appropriate coping strategies to see you through.
For example, imagine that your goal is to work alone on your company’s reception desk, but that the thought of dealing with members of the public (and their notorious unpredictability) terrifies you. CBT can help you to anticipate what the obstacles may be and how you may feel in advance, as well as to plan experiencing discomfort. No-one can experience the reality of stepping into the scary situation for you, though: you must do that yourself.
Recognising Problems in the Workplace
You have a core personality, partly determined by your genes, your environment and your upbringing (check out Chapter 9 for more details). Plus, how you present yourself varies in different situations. You may be aware of certain expectations of yourself in different roles, but essentially you remain the same person.
Finding out where you fit in and recognising your own work situation is helpful in identifying recurrent issues and potential struggles.
Experiencing conflict between your beliefs and actions
In order to be successful in the workplace, you need to be aware of what’s expected of you – because you can experience tension when this requirement doesn’t fit with who you are. The disquiet arises from a mismatch between what you’re thinking and how you’re being asked to behave. For example, you may feel angry at having to do some tasks or conform to certain working conditions and think that things just aren’t fair. You’d be correct.
But how hard you insist on gripping to your rigid views of how life ‘should’ be, bemoaning the fact that your work doesn’t measure up, is a large influence on how unsettled you feel at work.
CBT helps you to sort out this confusion. You don’t lose any sense of your true self and become an emotionless automaton with CBT, but you do find yourself making enlightened choices. I like to call this conscious compliance. You may not agree with something you need to do at work, but you do choose to comply, because ultimately doing so is in your best long-term interests.
Admitting your struggles
When you allow yourself to admit that things aren’t going along too well and that you’re struggling, you’ve made the first step towards doing something about it.
I used to work for a company’s Employees Assistance Programme, taking calls on the confidential helpline. I know from experience that the hardest part of the process was for employees to pick up the phone and make the call to say they’d like some help.
Even calling your GP to make an appointment for a physical ailment can be tough, because you may feel that you have some weakness in yourself that you don’t want to have to admit. Sometimes, when you’ve spoken the words, you can feel that it’s all too real. But not attending to the warning signs leaves you open to the problem getting worse.
Saying ‘I’m struggling a bit here’ is perfectly okay. You’re likely to judge yourself much more harshly than your friends and co-workers do. When it comes to the crunch, if someone you work with gets a serious illness you often notice people’s genuine concern.
Emotional problems can progress into crises and become critical if you leave them unattended for a long time.
Looking after yourself at work
You have a responsibility to take care of yourself at work. Keeping yourself physically and emotionally healthy isn’t only in your best interests, but also in your employer’s and workmates’ too (as I describe in Chapter 5).
When you drag yourself into work when you aren’t feeling well, you’re often not met with sympathy and concern. Great relief is felt all round when someone else makes the decision and orders you to go home. Oh, the joy when your boss tells you not to come back until you’re better – though these moments are probably quite rare.
CBT can help you develop the confidence to recognise when you need time out to get yourself physically and mentally fit, and the skill to understand and rationalise why doing so is in your long-term best interests.
Discovering the Benefits of the CBT Problem-Solving Method
This book shows you enough CBT techniques to enable you to go off and apply them to your own situation. For example, Chapter 2 describes CBT’s basic principles and practical applications (which come in a handy ABC framework) and Chapter 3 talks you through building your own CBT portable toolkit for fixing your emotional problems. To help convince you of its benefits, I also include real-world stories of how people have used CBT successfully in the workplace. I draw them from my experience of working as a CBT therapist with hundreds of employees in the private and public sectors for more than 20 years.
CBT is an evidence-based theory, using scientific, logical and rational methods to construct, assess and test its effectiveness. It’s proved to help people reduce their debilitating emotional states. Many research papers show, for example, that CBT seems to have long-lasting effects in treating anxiety and depression, which may be due in part to the fact that people are encouraged to discover the therapy and help themselves to stay well over time.
Accountability in CBT through confidential assessment and monitoring is a key factor in many health organisations choosing to use CBT as their preferred method of providing emotional support to employees.
Increasing a company’s productivity and positivity
As CBT has gained in popularity, more companies and HR departments are recommending this therapy for their employees.
You can’t overestimate the financial advantages of keeping a workforce healthy and happy. Chapters 6 and 13–15 look at some of the benefits to an organisation of adopting strategies that keep stress levels to a minimum and offer support for stress-related issues.
During your work life you’re bound to experience struggles in your personal life that may then impact on your professional life. But the great thing about CBT is that knowledge of it is just as helpful for personal issues as work-related ones.
Being an ambassador for CBT
When you’ve got the hang of CBT and are actively using it in your life, you may find that work colleagues comment on the change in you: perhaps you seem more relaxed and they want to know how you manage to stay calm during a crisis. Of course, you know that using CBT is an active therapy. You appear calm because underneath you’re consciously going through the ABC technique, which I explain in Chapter 2, to be on the alert for feelings of rising panic in yourself. You can then rationalise your thoughts to keep that anxiety in check.
For those moments when co-workers ask you, Chapter 14 encourages you to become a CBT ambassador yourself! I’ve taught many a colleague some principles of CBT in coffee breaks who tell me that they still apply them years later.
Selecting the work life you want
One aim of using CBT is to have only a healthy concern for what’s happening around you, rather than a debilitating state of anxiety about events.
Work can make many demands on you, some of which may not be to your liking. You may need to fulfil those demands to keep your job, but CBT encourages you never to lose sight of who you are. Even in the harshest of conditions, people have kept their sense of values and personal beliefs. Viktor E Frankl was a survivor of the holocaust who endured terrible conditions. He’s quoted as saying:
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
CBT is about helping you to uncover your beliefs and attitudes and check whether they’re helping or hindering you. (Chapter 4 has loads of useful info on the importance of maintaining a healthy attitude at and about work, and Chapter 10 talks about creating your own philosophy on work.) You can always choose your own way (Chapter 12, in particular, shows you how).
Becoming balanced professionally and personally
The issue of striking a healthy work–life balance (which I cover in Chapter 16) is a concern across many countries and cultures. The blurred boundaries between work and personal life can impact heavily on people.
Make sure that your life isn’t dominated by work, if that’s not what you want. Check out how your life is working every now and again, and use CBT to help identify when you’re getting out of balance.
CBT suggests that you work towards an acceptance of some situations and events and not to upset yourself about things beyond your control. When you can truly accept some difficult things, and change the way you view them, you free yourself up to move forward.
Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.
—Albert Einstein
Chapter 2
Discovering How CBT Works
In This Chapter
Getting to grips with CBT
Considering the basics
Using CBT to help yourself
People have visited doctors or healers of some sort for physical illnesses and injuries for centuries. Today, humans know more about their bodies and what to do when things go wrong than ever, and more professionally trained medical personnel are available.
People are also becoming increasingly familiar with the idea of seeking help when life gets to be an emotional struggle. Sometimes people’s mental health can become so adversely affected that they have difficulty coping with everyday life, let alone work. But the balance between merely having a tough time and becoming seriously anxious and depressed, resulting in an inability to function properly, varies from individual to individual.
When you experience struggles that affect your emotional state, you can be confused as to where to go for help, and even feel embarrassed – which is where cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) comes in. In this chapter, I describe CBT’s role, the basics of how it works and how it can help you improve your emotional wellbeing.
Understanding Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
CBT is a practical psychological strategy that takes into account people’s thinking, behaviours and emotions. It’s designed to help them bring about a change in their emotions, usually from an unsettled and unhelpful state to a calmer and less disturbed one. Healthcare organisations around the world are increasingly recognising and adopting CBT. It’s particularly favoured for helping people to address their struggles at work, and for helping them get back to work when they’ve had to take sickness absences or their performance at work is being affected by distracting emotional states.
As an accredited CBT practitioner offering and implementing CBT in the workplace for individuals and via training courses, I’ve found that CBT can be an extremely helpful strategy for workers to discover and implement.
A key aspect of CBT is that it shows individuals how to become their own therapist. It’s a highly practical therapy that explains and involves the subject. Individuals find out how to work out what’s happening for them and why they’re feeling the way they are, as well as strategies for reducing unsettling emotions.
Sometimes CBT is referred to as a brief therapy, because it doesn’t necessarily require months and years of attending weekly sessions: some people need only a few sessions to get the hang of it and successfully apply it to themselves. On average, depending on the emotional state of the individual, about six CBT sessions can be a good start to gain an understanding of CBT in order to start applying it for yourself. I routinely work with employees who find a couple of sessions helpful enough to redress the mild emotional imbalance they’ve been experiencing.
This book gives a background explanation of CBT theory and methods. It’s not intended to replace medical consultations and advice, which are very important. Emotional imbalances can vary in severity and you should always let your medical practitioner know when you’re experiencing troubling thoughts and emotions. This book isn’t a substitute for overall healthcare but an informed addition for your wellbeing library. Use it to help you gain more insight into yourself, particularly in the workplace.
Introducing the components of CBT
CBT is quite simple in concept:
Cognitive: How you think.
Behaviour: How you act.
Therapy: A conscious intention to bring about change.
CBT is about linking your thinking to your behaviours and deciding whether you want to change some unhelpful behaviours. It’s extremely effective at challenging everyday problems that affect people in the workplace and looking at ways to help reduce associated negative or ‘unhealthy’ feelings.
Some frequently occurring such feelings include (in no particular order):
Anger
Anxiety
Depression
Embarrassment
Guilt
Hurt
Low self-esteem
Self-doubt
Shame
People also experience many other feelings daily that come and go without people paying close attention to them.
Human beings are highly efficient information processors and are bombarded with information from the minute they wake up. Just think how many decisions you make automatically: washing, what to wear, what to eat, getting ready for work, and finding your way to work are just a few. If an app were able to monitor your feelings and display an ‘emotional graph’ at the end of each day, you’d amazed at the gamut of your emotions!
Here’s the thing though: only you know what you’re feeling – and half the time even you’re not sure! Identifying specific feelings can be difficult. You process unconsciously a lot of the time, but that doesn’t mean that your information input has no impact on your physiological and psychological systems. Even when you’re asleep, your brain is busy and active, sorting out information from the day’s events and making links with past ones.
Internal thinking triggered by your own thought processes and past stored memories all have an impact on your emotional state. In order to understand CBT, you have to be aware of all events that impact you.
Deciding whether you want to use CBT
Sometimes you can be so involved in lurching from day to day in order to survive that you don’t realise the adverse impact that activities are having. You don’t allow yourself to stop and acknowledge that you’re struggling, because the primary need to provide for yourself and others means that you can’t afford to ‘crumble’.
Deciding that you really want to make a change is key to successful CBT. You have to recognise, through your own insight or by another person’s prompting, that some of your current behaviours aren’t in your best interests.
Saying ‘yes’
The first step in deciding to seek therapy comes when you allow into your consciousness the fact that all isn’t well. More often than not, you start experiencing distressing symptoms of anxiety-related behaviours and realise for yourself that things aren’t right.
Or, perhaps at work, a friend takes you to one side and expresses his concern for you. This action is a hard thing for anyone to do, because conveying to you that he’s worried is difficult for both of you: you may feel as though you’re being criticised or judged, and he may worry that he may offend or upset you. Everyone can get defensive in such situations.
Or maybe your manager has a word with you about your performance, which triggers a decision to go to your GP. In some cases, if a person’s behaviour prompts concern that he may be a danger to himself, others or to the company, the employer may intervene in the employee’s own best interest.
Whatever the way in which you discover that you’re struggling, you need to admit it to yourself. The next big step is deciding whether you’re going to seek help. Realising that you aren’t performing at your best can feel alien and be quite a shock.
Facing stigmas
In some cultures and situations, particularly at work, people can feel that admitting that they’re struggling with emotional distress is a sign of weakness. People fear a professional and social stigma.
For example, people with impeccable work histories, who’ve worked efficiently, conscientiously and without any previous difficulties, may suddenly find themselves experiencing symptoms of stress. A common coping strategy is to enter a state of denial, which isn’t at all helpful.
The most helpful thing you can do for yourself is to allow yourself to accept that you are struggling; it is not a sign of weakness. The next step is to try to tell someone else that you are finding work difficult and that it is affecting your emotional state every day. It is okay to ask for help – you may be surprised at how willing other people are to listen.
Realising that you can change if you want
Most people in full-time work spend approximately 40 hours a week working, with many working a lot longer, depending on their job and the demands made upon them. The all-pervasive use of information technology means that employers can contact many workers 24 hours a day, as well as at weekends and on holidays.
In addition, unless you’re self-employed, your job role and requirements are usually externally imposed. You may have some input as to how and when you meet these demands, but your contract with your company is an agreement to fulfil its requirements.
Even if you are your own boss, the management of your own role and the success of your venture is reliant upon you meeting the demands required for the successful completion of projects.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, the issue of work–life balance is a potential source of difficulty and conflict for many people.
One of the major sources of unhappiness and distress is feeling trapped and powerless in a job. Not having control over your workload is a common predictor of workplace stress.
Fortunately, CBT can help you get your job in perspective. It can help you view your job and its demands in a healthy and manageable way so that you concentrate your energies on the things you can control and don’t engage in unhelpful worrying about issues and events beyond your control.
Meeting the ABCs of CBT
CBT evolved when psychologists who worked with people with emotional struggles came up with ideas as to why these problems arise (check out the nearby sidebar ‘A brief history of CBT’ for more).
In the following sections, I introduce you to some essential concepts of CBT, so that you can understand more about what CBT is and how it works, how to investigate your emotional responses, and how to correctly identify your feelings.
A brief history of CBT
Even though thousands of years ago the Ancient Greeks recognised that people could become out of sorts emotionally, not a huge amount of research was done into people’s moods until the 19th century (when Freud developed his psychoanalysis techniques). Over the following decades, other theories investigated how and why people experience negative and unhealthy emotions.
The 1950s witnessed moves to create theories and therapies that could include people’s thinking processes and combine those with the outward behaviours in which the people engaged. This psychological movement was called Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. One of the founding proponents was psychologist Aaron Beck. He noticed that depressed and anxious people seemed to think negatively, beginning a new line of investigation into emotional health.
Even before Beck, a psychoanalyst in New York called Albert Ellis had noticed that people who were upset with events in their lives tended to think in irrational ways: how they viewed themselves, their work and the world in general shared common themes. Ellis proposed that irrational thinking gave rise to unsettled emotions and, in fact, that people were upsetting themselves, and sometimes making themselves unwell.
