Cognitive behavioral therapy
Article
Cognitive behavioral therapy is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between May 25, 2021 and July 24, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Every part of cognitive behavioral therapy sounds and feels obvious”; “cognitive behavioral therapy is an intervention that is proven to work”; “compare this to cognitive behavioral therapy”. It most often appears alongside Google, Harvard, India.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 4
- Issue count: 4
- First seen: May 25, 2021
- Last seen: July 24, 2024
Appears In
- Peer Review Request: Depression
- ACX Grants ++: The Second Half
- Constitutional AI: RLHF On Steroids
- Links for July 2024
Related Pages
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- Google (3 shared issues)
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- Harvard (2 shared issues)
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- India (2 shared issues)
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- London (2 shared issues)
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- San Francisco (2 shared issues)
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- Substack (2 shared issues)
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- US (2 shared issues)
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- 2002 meta-analysis by Cochrane Collaboration (1 shared issues)
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- 2018 (1 shared issues)
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- 5-HTP (1 shared issues)
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- 5-HTP (1 shared issues)
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- @BendiniUK (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Every part of cognitive behavioral therapy sounds and feels obvious. Partly this is because CBT is the ancestor of most of today’s psycho-babble and self-help, so its advice has become cliched. But another part of it is that knowing things isn’t enough. I know that if I lifted weights every day I could become very strong, I even know some more complicated body-building advice, but the advice itself is nothing; the practice is everything. Cognitive behavioral therapy blurs the line between knowledge and practice; it involves practicing knowing things and thinking things. The number one misstep people make is believing that since they already know the thing, they don’t need to practice. This is wrong, and a good CBT therapy or course will be as much about building a routine to practice the skills as it is teaching you what you need to know.
David Burns is one of the gurus of cognitive behavioral therapy. His book Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy is the canonical guide for do-it-yourself-CBT. I understand he has just put out an updated book, Feeling Great – I have not read this one and can’t confirm it is as good, but the title seems promising.
Inline links: Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, Feeling Great
#118: CBT App To Help Depression Depression affects 17 million US adults. Anxiety affects 40 million. For people with these and other mental health challenges, cognitive behavioral therapy is an intervention that is proven to work. Unfortunately, less than half of the people that would benefit from therapy end up getting it. This can happen due to time, cost, stigma, and other constraints. Mobile and web apps can be helpful in overcoming these hurdles, but current products have their fair share of problems. Some are slick, but use "fluffy" content. Others stick to the evidence, but don't prioritize usability. We think there is an opportunity to create a CBT app that is evidence-based, easy to use, engaging, and low cost. Here are preliminary mockups that illustrate what we’re building: tinyurl.com/yckz8k9v Currently, we have an app built that we’re testing internally ahead of a wider release. We’re looking for $5,000 that would go toward Legal consultation, paid user research, marketing and advertising. Would also love advice if you have experience in the space! The team comprises me (Calvin, engineer, linkedin.com/in/calvin-woo), Maria (designer, linkedin.com/in/mhmichelsen), Shwetha (engineer, linkedin.com/in/shweta-patrachari) and Stephanie (clinical psychology PhD student at UCLA, linkedin.com/in/stephaniehtyu) You can contact me at calvinwoo32@gmail.com
As a psychiatrist, I can’t help but compare this to cognitive behavioral therapy. A patient has thoughts like “everyone hates me” or “I can’t do anything right”. During CBT, they’re instructed to challenge these thoughts and replace them with other thoughts that seem more accurate to them. To an alien, this might feel like a perpetual motion machine - plugging the brain back into itself. To us humans, it makes total sense: we’re plugging our intellectual reasoning into our emotional/intuitive reasoning. Intellect isn’t always better than intuition at everything. But in social anxiety patients, it’s better at assessing whether they’re really the worst person in the world or not. So plugging one brain module into another can do useful work.
5: When I studied Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the textbook cases would involve people with ridiculously distorted thoughts, like a billionaire who worried he wasn’t successful enough. I always wondered if any real people were that messed-up; as always, Twitter delivers: