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To be happy. I don't do meditation (and in fact get kind of irritated that practitioners of it seem to imply the only way to get in more control of your brain
by benihana 11y ago
To be happy.
I don't do meditation (and in fact get kind of irritated that practitioners of it seem to imply the only way to get in more control of your brain is through meditation), but I practice CBT. The idea is to be in greater control of your conscious and subconscious processes by being more aware of what's going on in your brain.
For example, I noticed that when people make suggestions on products I work on that have the potential to violate users' privacy, I tend to get defensive and argumentative over that point. Using CBT and practice, first I was able to identify the emotions that rush over me when that happened. Then, I was able to notice and acknowledge those emotions happening and finally I was able to control them and let them pass without influencing my behavior. The last step in the puzzle is finding out why that particular issue is so triggering to me.
After becoming aware of these things, I'm a lot less anxious, my relationships are much stronger, my communication is better, and I'm just in a better mood and happier in general.
- 7An2ieoW 11y agoSo, how do you get started in CBT and establish the practice? Any resources?
- kentt 11y agoI'd start with something like this: http://www.amazon.com/CBT-Toolbox-Workbook-Clients-Clinicians/dp/1936128306/ http://www.amazon.com/CBT-Toolbox-Workbook-Clients-Clinician... I started with Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, by Burns, and it's really good but an overwhelming amount of information. That being said, I do have an appreciation from mindfulness meditation as well as CBT. They complement each other very well. I'd recommend the audiobook Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World. It's a really easy way to get started and you'll definitely feel like your life has improved by the time the 8 weeks is up.
- ncphillips 11y agoFrom what I've briefly read in this paper, it looks like they use the word "meditation" broadly enough that CBT would be included in it's definition.
- goldfeld 11y agoActually you do meditation. Just because "science" finally acknowledged and formalized the power of doing what your second paragraph describes, it doesn't stop being precisely what Buddhism has advocated for millennia with insight/vipassana meditation. You actually don't have to sit down in lotus position (or lie in bed) to practice meditation, that's but a convenient time and setting of intensive practice, but the goal is to have meditation be an all-encompassing activity permeating your life. Many techniques of contemporary dance, for example, are meditation. They teach you to be aware of your full body in motion, fiber by fiber stretching and contracting, moment by moment. It's meditating on bodily impulses, not consciousness ones, but a trained dancer in action has in any case no consciousness of anything else but her body, rhythm and the abstract meaning (i.e. the image) of that, but those three get dissolved into one in dopamine and that's what people call "incorporating", you lose the sense of self.
- DanBC 11y agoCBT isn't meditation or mindfulness and there's not much similarity.
- godDLL 11y agoCBT is the medical approach to mindfulness. You're looking at mindfulness through a microscope, that's why you can't quite make out the shape of the subject.
- DanBC 11y agoI don't know what to tell you - CBT has some small overlap with mindfulness, but they're not the same and there are important differences.
- geomark 11y ago"I was able to identify the emotions that rush over me when that happened. Then, I was able to notice and acknowledge those emotions happening and finally I was able to control them and let them pass without influencing my behavior." That is precisely one of the central practices in the meditation practice I am familiar with.