Stress and Illness   |   Creativity and Health

Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is a mainstream means of helping people with illnesses like anxiety and depression.

CBT began in 1955, in the form of REBT - “Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy” - as introduced by Albert Ellis. Ellis’s key concept was that irrational ideas and beliefs are very often what cause persisting emotional distress.

Ellis observed how people can hang too tightly onto their way of interpreting their experiences - and define themselves incorrectly as a result. Hence, to suffer a setback, for example, can be read as “evidence” for one’s “lack of luck” or “failure”. As such, our mind can become an echo chamber of false “truths” (see “parrot perception”).

Typical of this is to see only “the bad” in something or someone, perhaps even in our own self (see “swan perception”).

Ellis’s solution is to keep a calm, rational perspective on the things that happen to us, and to be a little more accepting of reality.

For Ellis, we can afford to have a little more faith in life and in what it holds in store. We can afford to give a little more credit for our human potential - and for our ability to emerge from our past struggles in a good place.

We have to break the tendency for “negative event” (e.g. failing at a job application) to lead to “negative thinking” (“I am a loser”). This tendency, Ellis saw as the very essence of irrational thinking - a thinking observed by fellow CBT pioneer Aaron Beck as automatic (see also “stressed perception”).

Beck saw the need to challenge a person’s irrational and negative thinking - and encourage a person’s ownership of the part played by their (mis)perception.

Ellis recommended that we become more aware of our irrational thinking in response to events. Challenge our irrational thinking, he suggested, and switch to thinking about our life in a more proportionate, rational way.

Meanwhile, we must avoid the common trap of associating our “negative” feelings and thinking with the “negative events” that apparently trigger them.

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