Of Like Minds is now Mood!
Find us at www.moodletter.com
and change your Favorites listing

Sign up for our newsletter

Over 175 articles on:

• Mood, anxiety
• Treatments
• Medications
• Lifestyles
• The system
• Book reviews
• People

Help support Mood --
$1/month for a year?

Bookstore

©Moodletter, 2008
For people living with mood and anxiety disorders and others who want to be happier and healthier. Moodletter is a non-profit organization.

You Feel the Way You Think.

These classic, best-selling books show you how negative and distorted thinking makes you feel depressed and anxious. One of the leading developers of cognitive therapy, author David D. Burns, M.D shows you how to change your negative thinking so that you can become happy and productive again. For those with mild to moderate depression and anxiety, the books provide valuable tools.

The way you interpret things, writes Burns, leads to feelings of anxiety, guilt, pessimism, low-self-esteem, and depression. Cognitive therapy teaches you how to handle criticism, deal with stress and stop procrastinating. Studies have found that cognitive therapy works faster to eliminate depression than conventional psychotherapy or drug therapy.

In Feeling Good and The Feeling Good Handbook, Burns identifies ten cognitive distortions that most of us will recognize, such as:

• All-or-Nothing Thinking (A straight-A student gets a B and thinks he is a failure.),
  
• Personalization (Her son's teacher suggests he could do better in class, she thinks, "I must be a terrible mother.") and
  
• Jumping to Conclusions (A friend is distracted and doesn't notice you and you think, "She's mad at me. I must have done something wrong.")

In each case, the individual becomes depressed and anxious because of the way they misinterpreted what happened.

This kind of distorted thinking is more common if you are feeling depressed. And, when you allow the negative thinking to influence your emotions, it only intensifies your depression. By learning to recognize patterns like these, you gain control over negative moods.

Feeling Good includes The Consumer's Guide to Antidepressant Drug Therapy.

About the Author
Dr. Burns is currently Adjunct Clinical Professor and Behavioral Sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine, where he is involved in research and teaching. He has received numerous awards and written a number of popular books on mood and relationship problems.

Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy and The Feeling Good Handbook are available in the Mood bookstore in the Depression section.

.

More articles