What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?
Cognitive behavioral therapy is a goal oriented psychotherapy treatment that focus on practical behaviors to solve the issues it addresses. The aim is to change thought patterns and therefore behaviors that are under the person’s life needs. This embraces a wide variety of emotional situations such addictions, phobias, anxiety, depression, difficulty sleeping or relationship challenges, just to name a few. The therapy works by changing people’s behaviors through being aware (conscience) of thoughts and focusing on images and beliefs and the way those affect attitudes and behaviors (cognitive processes).
As my friend A. who’s a psychiatrist was telling me the other day, cognitive behavioral therapy is therefore a combination of psychotherapy and behavioral therapy. While psychotherapy emphasizes the importante of the meaning we set on things and how thinking patterns are created in childhood, behavioral therapy addresses the relationship between the triangle: problems, behavior and thoughts and how they are all co-dependant and affect each other:
This relationship reaches its pick in a 30 minute timeframe, which in practice means for example: if you detect a certain thought that may not be the best for you and act upon it immediately then it will not develop during those 30 minutes until it reaches an emotion or it leads to a behavior that will contribute to affect you in a negative way. And the same goes the other way around, you can contribute to thoughts and emotions by implementing a behavior that will have a positive impact in the triangle and you should feel the peak benefits a while after you have initiated that behavior.
Why it works?
It tends to be a short therapy of less than a year and that it’s suited for each individual’s personality and characteristics. During the sessions the person develops new strategies to understand and act upon the issues with the help of the Therapist. Cognitive behavioral therapy introduces the person to a set of principles that can be applied whenever in need – ultimately becoming a habit – and that will last a lifetime.
Why Aromatherapy?
Aromatherapy is the practice of using essential oils to enhance wellbeing or to treat emotional conditions through the stimulation of parts of the brain. Since the sense of smell directly affects our limbic system, it can be used to have a positive impact on physical, emotional and mental states. Our sense of smell can identify over a trillion different odours (yes: you read it right: trillion!!!). Our olfactory glands are capable of near-immediate interaction with the brain’s amygdala and hippocampus, where emotions and memory are placed. So inhaling molecules communicates to brain receptors that control different tasks in our body such as blood pressure, heart rate, stress levels, sleeping patterns, energy levels, concentration, pleasure or motivation. This means that it is possible to treat a wide variety of symptoms with Aromatherapy from anxiety to hormone imbalance. So, for example, using again the triangle image we have seen before we should expect a positive impact after starting to diffuse a scent in the air and focusing on the breathing of it. This gives a whole new perspective to the fact that I always state that quality is important and how valuable one single drop of essential oils is. Aromatherapy is one of the ways how essential oils can impact your body, you and your life positively.
If you like this post, share it in your social media and visit Skin at Heart’s Patreon Page.