A number of you have – very sensibly – asked me what exactly is the difference between Cognitive Therapy and mindfulness. In cognitive therapy we change our negative or anxious thinking pattens by:
- Identifying the unhelpful thought causing negative feelings
- Challenging the thought, which means evaluating whether the thought is realistic (i.e. based on facts and evidence)
- Substituting the old, unhelpful thought with a new – and reality based – thought
Many of you will be familiar with this cognitive model from our sessions together
In contrast to cognitive therapy, which is an active process of changing the thoughts that make us feel bad, mindfulness is about becoming aware of the thoughts and feelings (c.f. step 1), but we don’t do anything to alter the thoughts or feelings.
Mindfulness, according to Germer, Segal and Fulton, involves being: “aware of present experience with acceptance”. This means that we watch thoughts and feeling arise, hang around for a while and then disappear. The picture that is sometimes used to describe mindful awareness is that it is like watching a stream where the thoughts are leaves that we allow to flow by. Thus, we let thoughts and feelings come and go without doing anything actively to change them in the knowledge that in due time they will change anyway (c.f., the concept of impermanence)
(Special thanks to Lucas for the typing)