Rewiring Our Minds: The Power of CBT
Episode Description
In this episode of Mind Your Mind, host Tim Unsinn and Dakota Family Services therapist Christy Wilkie talk about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and its effectiveness in battling unhelpful thoughts and beliefs. Utilizing cognitive restructuring, CBT helps change inaccurate and damaging self-perceptions and perceptions of others, leading to healthier day-to-day thought patterns. Christy also touches on multiple CBT exercises to try at home, as well as some of her own tactics for promoting helpful thoughts.What to Expect
- Overview of CBT
- Who can benefit from CBT
- CBT home exercises to try
Resources: Learn More
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Exercises: CBT Interventions (cogbtherapy.com)
- What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy? (apa.org)
Things to Think About
- Improved thinking leads to improved emotions and actions.
- Do you need help dealing with negative thoughts and self-perceptions?
- What CBT home exercises work best for you?
About the Guest
Christy Wilkie provides therapy for children and adolescents, ages 5-25, who have complex behavioral health issues. She combines her extensive clinical expertise with a belief in kids, and has a unique ability to find and develop their strengths. She works hard to be an ideal therapist for her clients, doing what is best to fit their needs.
Transcript
Rewiring Our Minds: The Power of CBT
Featuring Christy Wilkie, LCSW, Therapist, Dakota Family Services
Host Tim Unsinn:
Welcome to Mind Your Mind, a podcast presented by Dakota Family Services, an outpatient behavioral health clinic, located in Minot, Bismarck, and Fargo, North Dakota. In this podcast, I will talk with our experts about understanding and nurturing our mental health and wellness. I'm your host, Tim Unsinn. Join me each episode as we explore the intricacies of our minds, decrease the stigma of mental illness, learn practical tips for managing our mental health and well-being, and recognize when it's time to ask for help. Join me now to Mind Your Mind.
Host Tim Unsinn:
Welcome to this episode of Mind Your Mind. Our guest is Christy Wilkie. Christy is a therapist in Fargo and provides outpatient therapy for children and adolescents, ages five to 25. Christy, it is great to have you on Mind Your Mind. Our topic is CBT and exercise and its impact on mental health. However, before we get to that long title of a topic, I've got one question for you, and that is, why do you do what you do?
Christy Wilkie:
I do what I do to help other people find their potential in life, to enjoy everything that they can out of it. I think there's a lot of people that just kind of go through life struggling from day-to-day and not realizing it can be better. And I really want to bring awareness that they can feel better and that they can be better if they wanna do the work.
Host Tim Unsinn:
Well, that is absolutely who you are. If you run into Christy, she will energize your day immediately. All right, our topic is CBT and exercise, specifically exercises we can do at home. So what is CBT and how does it work?
Christy Wilkie:
CBT is cognitive behavioral therapy, and essentially what that is, is a therapeutic intervention that focuses on changing unhelpful thoughts and beliefs, attitudes and behaviors, and improve your emotion regulation by creating a set of coping skills to help solve some of those things. So essentially our day-to-day life, if you think about all the thoughts that you have in your head throughout the day, a lot of them probably aren't super helpful. And so what we do is take a look at your thinking patterns, the thoughts that you have about yourself and other people, and identify what we call cognitive distortions, where maybe you're not seeing something accurately or you're not perceiving something accurately and try to help you figure out a different way to see that.
Host Tim Unsinn:
Alright, so CBT it seems like it works on a lot of different mental health conditions. So what does that work for?
Christy Wilkie:
CBT will work for mood disorders, anxiety, depression, PTSD. A lot of times when people are going through life adjustments, if they've lost a friend or they've lost a spouse, or if somebody in their life has died, or even if they're getting bullied. All of those life events could benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy because a lot of those major incidents in your life really get you thinking. And when you're in a depressed state, you're not typically seeing things very realistically.
Host Tim Unsinn:
And things are not clear. So if someone's listening right now, they're hearing CBT first time, maybe, hearing some of the things you're talking about, would I or how do I know I am a good candidate for CBT?
Christy Wilkie:
I think anybody who is willing to change and wants to be open-minded and put in the work to feel better is a great candidate for CBT. A lot of times we look at you know, are you feeling anxious? Are you feeling depressed? Do you just kind of feel like something is off or you're just feeling kind of meh? Are you willing to come in and take a look at the way that you view yourself and other people around you and put in the work to see things differently and feel better?
Host Tim Unsinn:
All right. Now the fun part of this as we talk about CBT, cause I mentioned in the original topic, exercises and what can we do at home? So what are some exercises we can do at home to help change our thinking?
Christy Wilkie:
Right. So CBT, a big part of CBT is also building a set of coping skills to help you deal with the distress that comes from either distressing thoughts or emotions that you have. And so deep breathing is always something that we talk about, which sounds very therapist-y and everyone's like, Christy, deep breathing, really? And it, yeah, really!
Host Tim Unsinn:
It sounds too easy.
Christy Wilkie:
It does sound too easy. And I dare anybody to go and just take five really deep breaths, four seconds in, four seconds out, and tell me that you don't feel better. That always helps. Another thing that we do is called progressive muscle relaxation, which is basically the tightening and un-tightening of your muscles from your toes to your face, to the top of your head. And there's lots of ways you can do that. They have some on Spotify, they have them on YouTube. The trick is finding a voice that you really like, because sometimes people's voices are kind of aggravating, but if you find the voice of somebody you like and they can kind of walk you through that progressive muscle relaxation, that really helps you kind of distract from your thoughts and relax your body at the same time.
Christy Wilkie:
Something I have a lot of my clients do is to journal their thoughts. Anytime they think about something or they have a thought, to just write it down and time it and date it. And that's important because you can see if there's a pattern in your thoughts. If there's something in the timing of your day, are there times that you feel better or worse than others? And so what you end up getting is a pretty good picture of where your thoughts are throughout the course of the day, which is really interesting.
Christy Wilkie:
Another thing that we do is really when you're in cognitive behavioral therapy, a lot of the work that you do is outside of the office, right? If you really wanna change, we teach you how to do it in the office and then you gotta go out and practice it. And so it's really taking a look at those thoughts and journaling will help you do this too. And identifying what thoughts are not helpful, what thoughts are destructive, what thoughts are not accurate or true, and how can you look at that differently? So we call that cognitive restructuring, is restructuring the way that you think about things. And the way you think about things, influences how you feel, and that changes what you do. All three of those things are connected.
Host Tim Unsinn:
So much great information. I'm thinking if you're listening to this right now, and I always encourage you, podcasts are cool, because you can pause and rewind and start at the beginning and re-listen. So there's a lot of great information in there. I'm sure you'll be googling CBT because I did. It's just, well, you know, you all are smarter than I am, so you probably aren't, but I googled it to find out ahead of time. But really is interesting how we can rewire our minds and not be controlled by it, but control our minds versus the mind controlling us.
Christy Wilkie:
Absolutely. That's, that is the goal.
Host Tim Unsinn:
Alright. Christy Wilke is a therapist in Fargo and provides outpatient therapy for children and adolescents, ages five to 25. She's been our guest on Mind, your Mind. always great to pick your mind. It's great. Maybe we should change the title to "Pick Your Mind" instead. Anyway, we'll, we'll leave it as it is. Alright, before we wrap up though, and we need to wrap up, what do you do personally to mind your mind?
Christy Wilkie:
You know, I have really gotten into yoga lately. I exercise, I run, and I cycle. But yoga specifically has kind of really gets you to be in charge of your own body and your own thoughts. And the breathing that comes with yoga is great. And so I've really learned to love that. I surprised myself with that actually.
Host Tim Unsinn:
Good for you! That's exciting to hear. Cause I know you're, you're a marathon or you do a lot of cycling, things like that. So it's great to hear. And again, you're one of those people that just expand your mind by doing different things to have a healthy mind. So thank you so much.
Christy Wilkie:
Thank you for having me.
Host Tim Unsinn:
Thank you for joining us for Mind Your Mind, a podcast presented by Dakota Family Services. For more information, links to additional resources, contact information, and much more, go to dakotafamilyservices.org.
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