Improving Your Mental Health

After being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, your doctor may have recommended counseling services. Counseling, along with medication, is a great way to treat bipolar disorder, and it can help you by teaching you to control the way you look at things in life. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is one of many techniques used in counseling to help people that suffer from bipolar, and here are several things you should know if you are considering seeking counseling services.

What is CBT?

CBT is often used in counseling to treat people who suffer from depression, anxiety, addictions, and bipolar. Bipolar is a disorder that can leave you with mood swings, impaired judgement, risky behaviors, and nervousness. It can rob you of the joy in life, and it cause you to worry about every little thing that happens or that you fear might happen.

When a counselor uses CBT to treat a person with bipolar, the goal is to help the person change his or her way of thinking about situations, events, and happenings in life. This is done through talk therapy and it will require multiple sessions. CBT is a technique that is based on the philosophy that a person's thoughts and emotions all work together and influence one another. By training the brain to think differently, a person with bipolar may be able to reduce the symptoms he or she normally experiences.

How does it work?

When you initially begin visiting a counselor for CBT, the counselor will need to get to know you and the way your mind thinks. From there, the counselor will try to help you understand how your brain is controlling the way you think. The counselor will then try to help you learn techniques to think differently about the things that happen.

This often includes learning how to stop assuming the worst in every situation. For example, if you receive a text from a friend that tells you she had bad results from a recent medical test, you may instantly fear your friend will die. This could make you panic and worry, and it may be for nothing.

Through CBT, you can learn how to avoid thinking the worst by replacing those thoughts with better ones. In this situation, for example, looking at the situation from a better perspective could eliminate a mood swing. This might involve telling yourself that the test results might not be what your friend expected, but that you have high hopes the doctors will know how to treat him or her.

The basic principle of CBT is learning to reprogram your brain and the way you respond, think, and react to situations that occur in life. If you can do this, the symptoms of your bipolar might begin to diminish.

Counseling is an effective way to treat any type of mental illness. If you are interested in learning more, contact a counseling center like T M S Center of Nebraska LLC today.