Cognitive Behavioural Therapy or CBT for short is a therapy which can resolve an number of mental health issues. It works by changing a persons cognition and behaviours. The model works based on emotions and feelings being a direct result of cognition and thoughts or thought processes. Negative thoughts, especially Negative Automatic Thoughts (NATS) can lead to negative emotions, can can lead to behaviours that cause the person problems, re-inforcing the NATS and can result in mental health issues.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy involves teaching the person skills to cope better, and a set of tools to challenge these underlying thoughts (NATS) and try out this new thinking, improving the persons behaviour. One of the key tools within the CBT framework is the Thought Record. The Thought Record is a very powerful tool which allows the person to handle a stressful, emotional, or horrible situation in a safe and healthy way. The recommendation is to fill out the form, or follow the steps on paper on in a journal. There are electronic versions of the Thought Record, and there are Mobile Apps one can get, but it is the authors experience that the process of putting pen to paper works bets.

Here is the thought record form

1. Date and time - Log the date and time of either the occurence or when you are filling out the form your choice.
2. Situation description - Provide a brief description of the situation - don't go into detail regarding the thoughts and emotions, we'll come to that.
3. Emotions and ratings - List all the emotions you are feeling, and rate each of their intensities out of ten.
4. NATS (Negative Automatic Thoughts) - List down all the negative automatic thoughts that you are having, or had at the time.
5. Thinking errors - Review each of the NATS and list out all the thinking errors that you are having - some may actually be rational, so its okay to classify them as rational if you don't think there is a thinking error.
6. Rational response / challenge to NAT - This is the most important step, read the NAT, consider the thinking error, and provide a more rational response to the thought, the aim here is to provide a rational challenge to the thought, e.g. if you are catastrophising you may respond by saying what would be the worse that could happen, and evaluate in reality it would not be likely to happen, and that if it did happen that you would cope and what kinds of things you would do. The trick is to think about what you would say to someone who was having a similar thought - how could you rationalise the thought and make that person fill better about it.
7. Re-rate emotion - Once you've rationalised each of the NATS evaluate the intensity of your emotions by re-rating the emotions listined in step 3.

After following through this process typically you'll find emotions such as anxiety with an intensity of 8/10 could go down to 3/10. By challenging the thoughts it allows you to feel much better about the situation, see if rationally, and take appropriate rational actions based on the situations (sometimes doing nothing). If the first Thought Record does not improve your emotional state doing a second thought record may help.

Here is a break down of some common thinking errors;

• A mental filter - Dwelling on a single negative event to the exclusion of positive events and feelings. Example: A small criticism ruins an otherwise perfect day.
• All/nothing thinking - Seeing things in black and white (without grays) or viewing a situation as a failure when it is less than perfect.
• Awfulising - Telling yourself you can’t stand a situation thereby underestimating your ability to endure it.
• Blame and personalising - Seeing yourself or someone else as in control of, and therefore responsible for, a complex event, situation or relationship or action of another person.
• Exaggeration and magnification - Exaggerating your failings and minimise your strengths, qualities or achievements.
• Fortune telling - Anticipating things will turn out poorly no matter what you do.
• Leaping to conclusions - Leaping to a negative conclusion without facts.
• Negative labelling - Calling yourself or someone else a name. Simply an insult.
• Overgeneralising - Seeing a single negative event as an uninterrupted pattern of such events by thinking in terms of "always" or "never"
• Reading minds - Assuming - without knowledge - a person doesn’t like you or is reacting negatively to you.
• Reasoning by emotion - Assuming that because you feel negatively about something, it must be true.
• Should-ing - Telling yourself something “should” be a certain way, as if that were useful. Often used for self-motivation.